The Deal: I get ads for Jordan Peterson all the time on YouTube these days, for his new Daily Wire show.
The Good: Great violin theme; love it.
The Bad: But it means I hear the same JP soundbites over and over, and though I’ve generally been a fan of the man, his presence has become increasingly annoying. Maybe he’s just so resolutely serioso now. And increasingly conservative. He’s starting to really bug me, especially on soundbite repeat.
The Indifferent: Does he know that his bilateral color-asymmetric suit of the last few weeks is reminiscent of an old Fool costume?
The Worst: I know that subscribing to The Daily Wire would not stop the ads. Only paying Google would. And I Won‘t Do That.
Until a recent video by Rebel Wisdom, I had never heard of Samo Burja. I just do not follow international affairs well enough, I guess. But Mr. Burja’s discussion of Putin and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine struck me as not only interesting, but very much along familiar lines:
This analyst makes three predictions:
1. China develops more financial alternatives to First World financial systems and offers them to rogue states around the world. (I’ve talked about this before, on Paul Jacob’s podcast a few weeks ago. This could help collapse the dollar, by the way.)
2. Russia successfully occupies large chunks of Ukraine that it did not control before. (Seems likely. Surely Putin’s keeping the eastern sectors, but, this man says, more than just the Donbas region.)
3. Putin remains in power for the next year.
He also says Russia will become something of a vassal state to China, which is something neither we nor the Russians should want. But it is something the Chinese quasi-commies want (why don’t we just call the CCP elite caste the warlords or oligarchs? Please advise). And it is something that the embargoes will ensure. This is also a point I’ve made before.
The Romney position that Russia is America’s most dangerous enemy — the position that Obama once mocked but now Democrats push with spittle flying — is something China needs us to believe, for I suspect (and, again, have said as much to friends) that China pushed Russia to do this as part of its plan to weaken America which would allow it to conquer Taiwan. That’s not the only end game, but it’s a huge one, and Burja identifies it as Xi Jinping’s life goal. Seems likely.
Given that China has invested so much in the Democratic Party (Biden being a paid stooge and almost certainly a traitor in technical terms, and worthy of the firing squad), that all of the media has rallied propaganda to this diversion is hardly surprising at all.
Above all I do not want WWIII, which I think is likely if Biden loses control of what remains of his senses. What I think the corrupt insider Democrats yearn for is a protracted set of brushfire wars with a weakened Russia. But pushing Russia is really, really dangerous. Past Ukrainian policy by the Dems has been as insane as their desire to regime change Assad and their “successful” regime change of Qaddafi. These people seem like fools, but I don’t know precisely what they want. But if they want a One World Government with the power center in Beijing, they appear to be doing great.
Secondarily I don’t want the U.S. to become any more like China. Or Russia. This element — an unintended effect of international conflict known to classical liberals for centuries — is also something that Mr. Burja makes clear.
In recent podcasts with Paul Jacob, I tried also to make this point:
First (6:50), I suggest that the COVID over-reaction police states of New Zealand and Australia maybe disqualify them from “free nation” status, and therefore as American allies. Then (9:46) I explain my concern over how disastrous American interventions have been generally — in one country after another — and most recently in Ukraine. And when I got to the subject of biolabs in Ukraine, Paul Jacob not only agreed with me but expressed a bigger worry: that these may have been established there the better to escape American law prohibiting bioweapons research (just as the American military did with torture under Bush/Cheney). And I went on (22:39) to suggest that the current war started in 2020 with the release and psy-op packaging of SARS-CoV-2 into global society, courtesy of the Wuhan biolab, and that the point of China egging on Russia was to demoralize Americans from war to allow China an easier walk-in over the Taiwan Strait. And Democrats, because they are basically crazed enviro-nuts who think that energy is bad and are willing to make Americans poor the better to virtue-signal their commitment to “the planet,” are helping China along.
This is not the first time American foreign policy has been shanghaied to subvert our own freedom. Without any pressure from Spain, the United States succumbed to liberticidal imperialism during the McKinley administration, as William Graham Sumner made so clear in “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”
The extent to which the Democrats at large are bought off by the Chinese is probably limited. Actual, direct “Manchurian Candidate” subversion of an American political figure is probably limited to Joe Biden himself (though a subverted president is nothing to sneeze at). The rest just go along with subversion for the very reason subversion works, according to Yuri Bezmenov: you cannot subvert someone who does not want to be subverted, and Democrats have been pinko for my whole lifetime. They love big government transfer programs and all the rest, and since they themselves get involved in the government racket, they can add class-interest to their lust for subversion of the American system . . . which once upon a time was based on private property and distributed responsibility.
Which is why Democrats became such true believers in Trump’s vaccine program as well as enthusiastic pushers of lockdowns and mask mandates. They do not care about medical results, not really: they care about regimenting society, abridging the freedom of all for the sake of all (the basic idea of republican governance, but also of socialism) and, especially, of targeted victim groups. This is, after all, the basic game progressives play in psycho-politics: sacrifice by all for the benefit of a few. But the utility of the pandemic to the Chinazis and the globalists has been waning. People around the world now chafe under the lockdowns and idiotic (and obviously ineffective) mask mandates.
So: invasion to “the rescue” — the rescue of globalists’ subversion plans. The Great Reset and all.
Just how limp a noodle the COVID flail has become can be seen in how kid-gloved YouTube has been to Dr. John Campbell. In a series of videos, recently, he has explored the data that shows how destructive pandemic policy has been. And he has been allowed to continue. A half year ago he would have been de-platformed by the Deep State’s Internet service wing, Google/Alphabet.
And it is worth noting how amazing Campbell’s turn has been on the subject. Steve Kirsch, writing on Substack, explains the situation pretty well: “a former advocate of the vaccine, trusted by millions of people, has now realized he’s been deceived and he’s not happy about it at all.”
Paul Jacob wrote about Dr. Campbell’s discussion of recent Ivermectin study results, in “This Is Just Huge.” Kirsch fixes upon the doctor’s consideration of recent revelations from Pfizer about adverse effects of the mRNA treatment.
I share this not because the news seems all that new to me, but because many folks are just now realizing how wrong “the experts” were. In the wake of proof that the government has lied to us about the safety of mRNA coronavirus “vaccines,” we now get a lot of “how could people reject this information” and “how could they have suppressed information about adverse effects” sputterings.
Oh, the naivety. It is so very easy. Those on the inside had a lot of money and prestige on the line, while the masses of people are generally serviles, demanding to be saved by higher-ups. What I’ve seen over and over on this latter is incredulity that great groups of people could commit fraud and great harm, knowingly coupled with this: the belief that some must be sacrificed for the greater good — if some people must die that the majority be saved, all the better!
This sacrifice ideology, absolutely central to life in a wealth-transfer state, has been endemic for a century now. It is a sign that people have tacitly embraced what they would otherwise, in moments of clarity, describe as “fascist” or “Nazi” or “communist” principles. Because of this, along with propaganda-induced fear and tribal allegiances, the masses and the elites have pushed dangerous and deadly-to-some pseudo-vaccines while suppressing less expensive yet more efficient treatment and prophylactic regimens.
I think this is a sign of a decadent civilization.
To me, a decent, life-affirming political philosophy begins with the realization that majorities and even consensus opinion can be wrong. The low-level democratic idea insists that only a few “bad people” can commit great evils. This is obviously way off, and is the wedge notion that allows for a massacre society. Which we now live in.
And is that why we can actually encounter leftist Democrats talk about nuclear first strikes?
How low our society has sunk. But it can go lower, and, I fear, will. Under pressure to fulfill the entelechies they have already nurtured — let their adopted memes take over their lives and infect others — and as subverted by Chinese psy-ops and their own fears of imperialist Russia, American Democrats and neocons could actually destroy civilization. All it takes is a few nuclear bombs. Or a real plague. Or globalist totalitarianism.
Books that just came into my library, or that I have just begun reading.
Two months ago or so, my little sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in its later stages. Though she had had a tough case of the COVID in 2020, the hospital required her to take one of the “vaccines.” She chose the Johnson & Johnson, and then, in early July she endured her first chemotherapy treatment. In eight days she was dead.
I have been as listless as many who have taken the pushed treatments, since. No desire to make a podcast or write anything of much importance. But the times are not waiting for me. The onslaught of medical tyranny is coming.
Last night, my dog woke me up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I went on a binge of posting to Twitter and Facebook, doing little on Gab. My previous day’s Twitter foray was described as crazy by one Twitter follower:
I take my alarmist cue in part from seeing what is happening Australia and New Zealand and taking these societies as bellwethers. The tyrannies being set up there are quite horrific. I’ve been catching occasional news about it all, but one YouTuber — a fascinating and extremely odd gentleman going under the name Theoria Apophasis — has been engaged in a string of videos on the subject of Pandemic Over-Reaction Down Under:
Though things look grim, the logic of it all is so fractured that it is hard not to laugh. Somebody satirized the logic in a fine parody:
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO’S ‘WHO’S BEEN VACCINATED?’
Bud: ‘You can’t come in here!’
Lou: ‘Why not?’
Bud: ‘Well because you’re unvaccinated.’
Lou: ‘But I’m not sick.’
Bud: ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Lou: ‘Well, why does that guy get to go in?’
Bud: ‘Because he’s vaccinated.’
Lou: ‘But he’s sick!’
Bud: ‘It’s alright. Everyone in here is vaccinated.’
Lou: ‘Wait a minute. Are you saying everyone in there is vaccinated?’
Bud: ‘Yes.’
Lou: ‘So then why can’t I go in there if everyone is vaccinated?’
Bud: ‘Because you’ll make them sick.’
Lou: ‘How will I make them sick if I’m NOT sick and they’re vaccinated.’
Bud: ‘Because you’re unvaccinated.’
Lou: ‘But they’re vaccinated.’
Bud: ‘But they can still get sick.’
Lou: ‘So what the heck does the vaccine do?’
Bud: ‘It vaccinates.’
Lou: ‘So vaccinated people can’t spread covid?’
Bud: ‘Oh no. They can spread covid just as easily as an unvaccinated person.’
Lou: ‘I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. Look. I’m not sick.
Bud: ‘Ok.’ Lou: ‘And the guy you let in IS sick.’
Bud: ‘That’s right.’
Lou: ‘And everybody in there can still get sick even though they’re vaccinated.’
Bud: ‘Certainly.’
Lou: ‘So why can’t I go in again?’
Bud: ‘Because you’re unvaccinated.’
Lou: ‘I’m not asking who’s vaccinated or not!’
Bud: ‘I’m just telling you how it is.’
Lou: ‘Nevermind. I’ll just put on my mask.’
Bud: ‘That’s fine.’
Lou: ‘Now I can go in?’
Bud: ‘Absolutely not?’
Lou: ‘But I have a mask!’
Bud: ‘Doesn’t matter.’
Lou: ‘I was able to come in here yesterday with a mask.’
Bud: ‘I know.’
Lou: So why can’t I come in here today with a mask? ….If you say ‘because I’m unvaccinated’ again, I’ll break your arm.’
Bud: ‘Take it easy buddy.’
Lou: ‘So the mask is no good anymore.’
Bud: ‘No, it’s still good.’
Lou: ‘But I can’t come in?’
Bud: ‘Correct.’
Lou: ‘Why not?’
Bud: ‘Because you’re unvaccinated.’
Lou: ‘But the mask prevents the germs from getting out.’
Bud: ‘Yes, but people can still catch your germs.’
Lou: ‘But they’re all vaccinated.’
Bud: ‘Yes, but they can still get sick.’
Lou: ‘But I’m not sick!!’
Bud: ‘You can still get them sick.’
Lou: ‘So then masks don’t work!’
Bud: ‘Masks work quite well.’
Lou: ‘So how in the heck can I get vaccinated people sick if I’m not sick and masks work?’
Bud: ‘Third base.’
And…scene…
The illogic of it all is the astounding thing. Paul Jacob captured this yesterday by showing how challengeable the official line is:
A recent Reasonarticle on New York’s new vaccination passport informs that “there’s a case to be made . . .” yet neglects to mention that the opposite case can also be made.
What case is it?
Well, the Mayor Bill de Blasio-sanctified case is that “these [totalitarian] measures are important for getting as much of the population vaccinated as possible in order to reduce virus mutation and prevent more harmful variants from taking root.”
Yet the inverse is perhaps more persuasive. Several important figures in the medical and scientific community have been crying Cassandra* for some time, arguing that an ineffective vaccine, like the mRNA treatments sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna, may, according to epidemiological principles long understood, pressure the spreading viruses into the thing we don’t want: more deadly variants.
The normal course for a new contagion is for it to mutate into easier-to-spread but less deadly variants. Killing a host isn’t good for the virus, so it changes over time. Oddly, I rarely hear this mentioned.
Herd immunity, which is the prevalence in a community of enough people who can fend off the virus preventing transmission to weaker people, can only be helped by vaccination when the vaccines increase hosts’ immunity to obtaining it and spreading it — neither of which clearly applies to the current vaccines.
“From their very first conceptualization,” claims Geert Vanden Bossche, one of the biggest names in the industry to object to the vaccination campaign, “it should have been very clear that these ‘S-based’ Covid-19 vaccines are completely inadequate for generating herd immunity in a population, regardless of . . . the rate of vaccine coverage.”
Sans herd immunity but with universal vaccination, he says, deadlier variants could arise.
Is he right? I don’t know.
But the case against vaccine passports might reference epidemiology and virology from sources outside establishment-approved “scientific” opinion.
Totalitarians rarely have “the science” on their side.
The Reason article Paul quoted notes that there are no exceptions given, under de Blasio’s regime, for natural immunity. You have to take “the jab” no matter what, or no society for you. You will be kept out of all public buildings. Including “private” businesses. An astounding thing. My Facebook reaction to this policy was brief:
The irrationality here should be obvious. The consequences of the irrationality are perhaps less obvious, because Americans have never really seen their own society break into pure terror and mob-fueled totalitarianism before. They are unprepared. And most will deny the warning, calling the warning itself irrational. But Folly now calls to its own, and we can expect the madness to grow exponentially. It has been fun, so to speak. Now it gets grim. The end of the republic is at hand. Woo-hoo? (Ugh.)
Theoria Apophasis calls the process underway “bringing a people to its knees.” But it is not just the madness of crowds. There are guiding hands, as I argued, and it has been going on a long time. Take the vaccines. Vaccination has been hyped and the case for their success grossly overstated:
We are propagandized about vaccines for reasons of power: medical and political. More important than vaccination in [nearly] eradicating traditional major diseases was the automobile replacing horses (which shat everywhere) and the development of good plumbing and sewage systems.
“Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his own excreta.” Brian Aldiss, The Dark Light Years
Folks who like public Uplift could take credit for these two major developments, since government was involved in strategic ways. But why don’t they? Because there is scant more power to be gained by their promotion. The next ramp-up of power is from the medicalization of everyday life. Therapeutic tyranny is, as Thomas Szasz predicted, the next big thing.
And fabulism about vaccination efficacy is a key propaganda point to ushering in the new form of control.
New York’s vaccination passport is merely the first step. Politicians, bureaucrats, doctors and Big Pharma will take it all — take away as much freedom and dissolve as much distributed responsibility as possible — if we let them.
The rationales for masks, lockdowns, and the vaccines are all very bad. Courtesy of historian Tom Woods, I shared an important chart:
Here are the death numbers for Germany and Sweden. Sweden is at about 9% mask compliance; Germany has a medical-grade mask mandate. Yet same trajectory, same numbers. £ It’s almost like the virus does what it will, regardless of our “I feel better if I’m doing something even if it’s pointless” interventions. [Tom Woods]
My comment on this was succinct:
I’m so tired of the way most folks argue for masks. That is, like religious zealots. I argue against masks every which way — except one: I think masking when sick would be socially useful; masking when not showing symptoms, on the other hand, is socially detrimental. I’ve made the case before. It’s fairly obvious.
My view of the near future is quite bleak. But I do agree that not all hope is lost:
An intransigent minority can win. And did. In Afghanistan.
And, just so, if Americans wish to regain freedom, the would-be free must become intransigent, or they shall be ground down quickly. The grinding machinery of mob government is at the door….
And I do have a vision of how a freer society would handle contagions like the current one — and worse:
A free people would negotiate with each other openly and rationally on matters of how to handle sociality during a contagion.
They would not mandate coercive policies with ambiguous effects and then stick to their “sides” as if the issue were Eternal Security and the proper way to settle arguments were to point at specific Bible verses.
They would not revise their history books to conform to the latest policy whim, as the author of that history of the Spanish Flu did this past year. They would not blithely suppress ideas they disagree with. They would not scream at those whom they disagree with in public, and sic the cops onto children to pepper spray them for non-compliance with an ineffective mask mandate.
But we are not a free people. We are a disgraceful one.
That reference to a cop pepper-spraying a child who wasn’t complying with an idiotic mask mandate came from Australia, actually. But I feel at one with Australia. This is not just one country utterly pissing away freedom, here. It is most of a civilization. Ours. “Western,” so to speak.
The embargo, according to Florida’s senior senator to the United States.
Senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, explains the United States’ embargo on Cuba in a clear and enlightening way. I am as old as the Cuban regime, and I have never heard it explained like this. I am impressed:
The video, directly below, is the finale to a series of lectures on the history of unbelief from medieval to modern times. It strikes me as quite good — good enough that I just ordered the lecturer’s book on the subject. (I also cued up the audio version in Scribd.)
Alec Ryrie’s novel argument in this lecture is that the modern humanist consensus is not based on any of the major arguments or strains of intellectual atheism, but, instead, on the replacement of Jesus Christ as the center of our civilization’s moral universe WITH HITLER . . . as the Devil. What unifies most parties and certainly most citizens today is actually the Argumentum ad Hitlerium. The humanistic consensus, in Christian, non-Christian, and anti-Christian forms, is derived by inverting Hitlerism Popularly Understood. Hence our obsessive focus on one type of vice — racism, sexism, and other x-isms that intellectually congeal around the in-group/out-group antagonism — to the exclusion of other vices or any coherent set of virtues.
And this allows me to understand why I am so at variance with our general culture.
For I definitely did not derive and hone my normative thought via inverting Adolf Diabolos!
I find this devil-inversion method witless, and today’s cultic focus on this new Devil as sub-intellectual.
The reason for the former is that the method allows people to be manipulated by ideological propagandists and Deep State psy-op masters. The reason for the latter is that Hitler Popularly Understood is a hothouse flower, carefully cutivated and not enough of the real thing.
Hitler is in many ways far worse than his image, because the bulk of his ideas are now so mainstream. The welfare state itself was one of his crowning achievements, and it was an outrage, and quite integral to his designs. Yet many of the nutters who today think they oppose Adolf Diabolos in every possible way actually promote many of his key programs, and their commitment to these programs corrupts their politics generally. Sure, sure; I know, I know: They pick and choose — just as did the American military when it rescued thousands of Nazi scientists and engineers under Operation Paperclip and organized the post-war Deep State as this strange and quite dangerous echo of the Third Reich’s hidden core.
So now we have Boris Johnson and Joe Biden openly planning to regulate speech in a totalitarian fashion, and most people do not see this as the culmination of Hitlerism. I do.
And don’t, for it is also the culmination of the love of leftist socialism.
I am just not into setting up binaries and normative inversions. For I think we Hyperboreans must be mindful of the Law of Nemesis.
Which is in truth the real, animating spirit that is bringing an end to this age of the humanist consensus.
And Ryrie is surely right to prophesy that the current consensus will not last. And yes, I think it is in the process of collapsing right now, in a spectacular way.
The latest episode of the LocoFoco Netcast features Professor James R. Otteson, author of Actual Ethics (2006) and the forthcoming Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021). The video is up, now, on YouTube:
LocoFoco Netcast, April 6, 2021 (recorded a week earlier).
I chatted with Matt Asher a week or so ago. The podcast is up:
And as a video, too:
Matt has figured out the knowledge/trust issues of our time, and explores the problems in an interesting way. I think you may enjoy this one. You may find it even helpful.
And the UFO talk is not off-topic.
Matt Asher’s podcast is The Filter, and his most recent episode, referenced in our chat, is well worth looking up.
I help Paul Jacob make a podcast on Fridays. It is the weekend wrap-up of what he does weekdays on ThisIsCommonSense.org, “This Week in Common Sense.” The current episode is up on BitChute and YouTube . . .
. . . and is available as an audio podcast from most podcatchers as well as hosted directly on SoundCloud:
Wirkman Comment 