"Some things are actually impossible to visualise: our own death is the classic example. But some things are just bigger and more complex than our brains are capable of processing, and the likely progressive disintegration of the world system is one of them”.
An American professor friend attending a health conference in Beijing met the Chinese health minister and, at the behest of a fellow academic of Chinese extraction, the whereabouts of an imprisoned academic.
"I don't think you understand what I do here", replied the Minister. "My first task is to see that 4 billion meals get served every day without anyone being sickened or killed by tainted ingredients. My second is to clean up the shit that follows. After that, I attend to urgent issues”.
The reason the flu season was bad is because the mRNA vaccines have destroyed our immune system. We have all become spike protein factories. Our governments should be telling us to take vitamin D supplements to support our immune systems.
The vast majority of us are deficient. Many are critically deficient.
Kind of ironic that an article focused on magical thinking engages in its own form of magical thinking. Correlation is not causation. You had a bad flu season, but to assume lack of vaccination was the cause is just an assumption. Besides which, if not fully sterilizing, vaccination will drive viral variations, so apart from the problem of choosing the strain we're vaccinating against, we may be making matters worse by driving variation of the very thing we're trying to prevent. Not a winning strategy, except for the makers of vaccines.
"Our governments should be telling us to take vitamin D supplements to support our immune systems."
Exactly. Zinc also, which most people are deficient in. Not once however, in the entire covid fiasco did I hear any govt. agency or health institute make that recommendation. They also lied to us about the effectiveness of repurposed drugs and went as far as to threaten the doctors and scientists recommending that approach, even though the 'vaccines' were still a year away. Two of those recommended drugs are so safe that there was no justification at all for not trying them, even if they didn't help much, since there was nothing else available at the time, and repurposing drugs is (or was) the standard approach to dealing with a novel pathogen.
Given all the lies we were told by nearly every party to the covid fiasco, why should we ever trust them again?
Through the whole covid fiasco I was helped immensely by several doctors I found on youtube. Dr John Campbell was an avid proponent of the mRNA vaccine, until he started to see the data on vaccine injuries and excess deaths. His videos with professors of oncology and immunology are extremely troubling. The Doctor at meregenomics has discussed the intricacies of frameshifting and refocusing of igg4 antibodies, as well as the origins of turbo cancers in many videos.Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity pointed out back in 2020 that the furin cleveage site was a clear indication that the covid virus was man made. I also subscribed to Pierre Kory, the author of The War on Ivermectin. Dr Campbell has many videos on ivermectin and fenbendazole. Not only do these antiparasitic drugs have strong anti viral properties,
they are also showing extraordinary promise against many cancers. Check out his videos on fenben and ivermectin.
The only silver lining to covid for me is that, thanks to these brave doctors, who were often heavily censored, I discovered the importance of vitamin D and other supplements. I have been taking zinc with quercetin, nattokinase, NAC, melatonin
and bromelain as well as 12,000 ui of vitamin D.
Once or twice a week I take ivermectin. Since early 2020 I have not been sick for one single day. I was on a boat in Antarctica when almost all the passengers and crew came down with covid, but I had no symptoms.
Since I travel a lot, I was forced to get three mRNA jabs. Unlike many people I
admit that this was a huge error on my part.
For those who do not believe that the virus causes harm, I show them the data on ourwordindata excess mortality, and they are shocked.
Since early 2022, when the pandemic was effectively over, countries in Eastern Europe
where the average vaccine per person was just above 1, excess deaths are barely above zero.
In the USA, where the vaccine rate is about 2.4 per person, the excess deaths are around 9%.
In Western Europe, Canada , Australia and New Zealand, where the vaccine rates are
around 2.7 per person, the excess mortality is around 15%.
In the most highly vaccinated countries of Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Chile
where the average vaccine rate is over 3 per person, the excess mortality is running well over 20 %. This is unheard of outside of times of war.
Unfortunately there no signs that excess mortality is coming down.
One other person to follow is Dr Kevin Mckernan. He was the head of the human genome project at MIT. He is finding extraordinarily high levels of DNA fragments in the Pfizer vaccine, along with the promoter SV 40 which is known to promote cancer. My advice is to get on the supplements I mentioned, and stay on them.
They also appear to attack the spike protein in people with long covid.
In Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand
Why the absolutely impossible to ignore truths you have described here has been ignored is one of the great mysteries of our time. Wiser minds than mine have written about this wisdom-deficit since before I was born, and I'm 76. Even in my pre-teens, I saw something of this and gravitated to thinkers who did also. As it is, I think of myself in this life as one of the "martyroi" or "witnesses." Forced to watch a horrific catastrophe unfold stage-by-stage and powerless to alter it in any way. Breathe in. Breathe out. Best I can do, I'm afraid. Kudos to you for outlining these truths so powerfully.
It is generational. We have watched it happen. I fancied myself an existentialist in the 1950s when it was all the rage. It has been at least in the back of my mind since. Aurelien wrote two essays about it, A Philosophy for Really Hard Times and I am persuaded he has something. All this is preamble to two points. We have watched the decline of leadership and competence since we were kids. FDR, Churchill, De Gaulle, Stalin were competent leaders surrounded by people who actually knew how to do things. Engineers, electrical, mechanical, or chemical, were leaders in their fields and leaders of industry. Working men had a variety of skills and a well of ingenuity. If something broke down, they fixed it and only if it was beyond their "fix" did they call for help. To where did that attitude disappear? I think it left for China with the Western industrial base to be replaced by "computer jockeys" who know how to ride that "horse"only as long as it stays on the track they habitually follow. That is unfair to all those who wrote the programs and provide tech support, but you take my meaning. Financial "engineering" and a financialized economy is no substitute for the real thing. We had our "birthright" whisked out from under us by flimflam artists and robber barons redux.
I jumped the gun and posted before stating my point about existentialism. Camus was asked what does one do when faced with an absurd world.If this world is not absurd, it is chock full of absurdities. What is one to do? Camus's answer, continue, just go on without hope and without despair. Or, to paraphrase, keep shoveling and do not expect to a pony in that pile of horse manure
And me. The generation of politicians who served in WWII were forced to be competent, or die. They had a fully rounded picture of the world. Since then, the Neo-Liberals have taken over, destroyed the education system and privatised the economy into the hands of similar value-free and competence-free legalised and sanctimonious criminals.
You have touched on existential threats that most of us either outside of any power structure or simply a servant to them will have become familiar with emotionally grappling with as our ruling class have become deluded by the opiate of wealth. As necessity is the mother of invention it is only once enough of the world’s human populations inevitably permanently lose their second gilded age creature comforts that any cultural recreation will be seeded. Until then it is our lot to endure this shrinking of human imaginations and the degradation of place.
The dominative narrative, as pointed out includes, along with its associated trappings, renaming short-sighted to short-term, and then rushing off, the rest of the world in tow, with not the slightest idea of where/what a finish line even is.
Perhaps, I too am falling for the seductive, short-term, 'do something' syndrome so well described in this article, but I do have a belief that the answers to such problems, we are currently facing, due to their size and complexity, are not solvable by any one person, or even by individual organizations, but rather through extensive and deep organizing among and between them.
Helpful nswers can come from anyone, and many ones. Being connected, vocal, strategizing while seeking effective tactics, and yes, acting, are all important in counteracting the dominant narrative. How do we do that organizing?
My reading of the archeological record and history is that the only organizational structure capable of achieving what you propose has been religion. I don't see much appetite for that sort of thing just now, but a calamity big enough might see a resurgence of interest. Christianity is a desert weed, after all ...
Unfortunately, Christianity is among the most intellectually and logically unsatisfactory religions (along with Islam and Judaism). Far better would be one of the Indian or Chinese religions. Even Wicca would be better - at least you might get naked dancing round a campfire! 😳
The succes of a religion is not intellectual or logical. It is the capacity of put together diferents behaviors of society through symbolism. In this case, most of religions (if not all) tend to orient their symbols to the future and create a conformist and dogmatic basic that is capable ob keep social cohesion. Moral acts in a similar way (nationalism, for exemple, that gives to the elites a future goal and a direction). I am atheist, and the idea of God is contradictorial and easily deniable; it is false its existence. However, I appreciate the multiple functions of religions in different spheres (social and individual).
If your 'idea of god' is contradictory and easily deniable, then you have not considered the question in sufficient detail. Of course the idea of a 'father in the sky' whose main desire is to be worshipped, is a ludicrous - even insane idea. But there is much more to the idea than that. I don't personally believe in 'god', but he/she/it is not so easily dismissed.
I mean this: omnipotence, the problem of unnecessary evil and the goodness of God, the problem of the creation of God (if he creates, ¿who create it him?), the studies in atropology that shows that religions evolve from a zoomorfism, to antropomorfism until more abstract ways of conceiving Gods and so on... It is a contradictorily idea, at least in the usual forms of Theology.
It is not a naïve deniable of God. It is base on philosophy and works from other people that I've heard or read.
Any such altruistic endeavour, and agreed, solutions to our complex societal crises can only ever be found through a complex of different voices, and only be initiated once those mature enough to be confident that they are able to think through complex patterns, find each other. Such a group would be able to jettison any of the vast tribe of hot little monkeys on the make who mimic competency.
As this is an organic process its emergence will be unpredictable.
My view is that you resort to magical thinking when real reforms involve subverting your "state ideology," a set of beliefs that holds your society and the legitimacy of the government together. This is not necessarily an Anglo Saxon thing: there are several tons of history that addresses why China failed to modernize in mid to late 19th century as Japan did--and the magical thinking plays a huge part in that story. Their idea was that Western power depended only on the "tactics" and techniques, which could be bought and paid for, but the ultimate goal was to not change anything about the China that was. So millions upon millions went to buying Western arms and ships and hiring alleged Western experts, but with a wilful and deliberate ignorance about how these fit into (non existent) Chinese vision of where it stood in the world--you can't have a vision if your goal is that you don't want to be part of the world that you didn't like, where you are not the center of the universe. Ultimately, the whole thing came to the spectacle where discontented and unhappy masses recruited to cause trouble on promise of literal magic, the so-called Boxers who were told that a combination of Taoist mysticism and Chinese martial arts could somehow neutralize Western technology, because every reform attempt that didn't subvert the state ideology failed. While in a different form, we can almost see the outline of the Western Boxers being mobilized by Empress Dowager Trump on the promise of Capitalist mysticism and Anglo Saxon enterpreneurship that could somehow neutralize the Easterners.
The funny thing, of course, is that, back in old China, too, the politics were cast in a false dualism: the obscurantists rallying to the Boxers vs enlightened and rational "Westernizers." The truth was, of course, different: the real alternative to the Boxers that could actually appeal to the Chinese were various nationalist reformers, most of whom definitely were not exactly "friends of the West," even if they didn't reject Western ideas out of hand, ranging from Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. But it took a whole century for them to sort things out (and the process is still ongoing, in fact.) Things will stay in flux for a long time in the West as well and I don't relish the thought.
Very good. I give you a complement: ¿why these ideas opposed to the ones sustained by the State are attacked or denied?
Because these ideas, usually (not always) ara defended by other groups of population that could threat the hegemony of ruling elites (or economical, or cultural elites). I don't know about China, but you can see (repite: I don't know, this is based on a couple of readings) how they attacked the "western ideas" that were sustained, or could be used, by economical elites that could threatened the ruling class. Today, it happen the same: the ideas could threat the position of economical and ruling elites in Western countries.
This one was powerful. It does deserve 3 coffees, or I feel it does.
Please post it on all subreditts dedicated to public servants. I say it as a public servant myself.
Working on issues related with climate change impact on public health, I refused to deal with food security, knowing beforehand that health has no available information, nor agriculture, and that most/all of food production, processing, transport, distribution is in private hands, so I was in no mood to go on wild geese chases. Rumors of the first working group meeting in the undisclosed area fully confirmed my gut feeling and kind of fell under the umbrella of this essay. Scarry as hell.
Humans survive hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands, generally staying within limits. We put rulers in charge and it's just been ten thousand years of overgrowth, misery, slavery, and collapse. I'm starting to think that maybe we're better off running our own lives without rulers.
1. The West in general and the US in particular has been able to half-ass planning because it has been able to rely upon brute force, and to hell with the consequences, those are for the little people to deal with.
2. "Consider, for example, the contrast between the US construction of an international alliance for Gulf War 1,0 and the political shambles of its successor. Whatever you think of the earlier episode, it was skilfully and professionally carried out, and had a simple strategic objective: the creation of a wide international coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. By contrast, the second episode was pure magical thinking, whereby an invasion would “create the conditions” for a peaceful, democratic pro-American state."
Simply turning Iraq into a failed state was seen as a win, but this could not be said out loud.
3. "Or consider the difference between the shambles of Brexit and the management on the British side of the 1991 European Union negotiations. Whatever you think of British objectives in 1991, they were largely achieved, because the government machine, though weakened, was still capable of acting effectively and turning political aspirations into specific activities. By 2016-19 that machine had largely been destroyed, and even had it not been, the capability for strategic thought had pretty much disappeared from the higher reaches of government. Boris Johnson seemed to think that he could just wave a magic wand and the problem would be resolved."
The UK simply outsourced its military to the United States, following its American Master around like the little yappy dog that follows Spike The Bulldog in the Looney Tunes cartoons.
Anyway, I have read the theory that the real reason Johnson got cracking with Brexit was to preserve the Five Eyes relationship between MI 6 and the US. FULL DISCLOSURE: I have no idea and express no opinion whether or to what extent there is any truth in this.
You argue that the collapse of the West is the result of a lack of strategic thinking attributable to growing infantilism of politicians, and so, broadly speaking, to stupidity, rather than malice.
But there IS strategic thinking underlying the dystopia, and long-term planning IS taking place. The point is, this is /malignant/ planning, engineering the collapse. For an instance relating to the food crisis you are observing, read: https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/global-war-on-farming These policies are not haphazard at all, and not short-term-profit driven. Depopulation by starvation seems to be the deliberate goal. A similar case might be made for many other policies; read for instance: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/09/investigative-reports/sustainable-debt-slavery/
Why are the stooges, counterintuitively, required to be incompetent? Firstly, so that they do not realize the long-term consequences of the decisions they are prompted to make; but more importantly so that, afraid of exposing their ignorance, they rely for all their decisions on the guidance and instruction of shadow advisors. This was evident in the Covid crisis, where any change of course came slowly and haphazardly, with some "decisionmakers" still following yesterday's slogans until their handlers got around to redirecting them; and the media got fed the new "line" last of all, and so lagged behind changes of policy.
I am trying to fight the feeling that it is only my advancing age that makes me embrace this spiel - but it's more than that. I worked in Local Government and ran redevelopment schemes and we achieved things but they took time, organisation and skill. Local Government has been hollowed out now. And there seems to be little practical training remaining. How I envy the Chinese. If I was young again that's where I'd want to be. I am sick to death of our erstaz democracy - fetishised as a thing in itself. We need stability strategic planning and skill - and it has gone. In the past it was achieved only by the mainstream parties all basically agreeing with each other but that has been shattered by the reality of living in a word of 'financialisation' which is about to collapse. I saw it coming a couple of decades ago and retired to the hills. I am kept alive only by curiosity as to how things will turn out.
The West’s almost-complete lack of strategic thinking and planning capacity applies to the whole of the ecological crisis, including the climate crisis
Yeah, exactly, it's all far too complicated for people to understand, and it's not at all because people are fed 24/7 propaganda by economic interests and they deliberately absorb it because they don't give a damn about other people's problems.
You can't imagine what it's like when cities with millions of inhabitants become uninhabitable? Look at Ukraine.
You can't imagine how they deal with millions of refugees?
As if the West ever gave a damn about the suffering and hunger in the world, it's that complicated.
Yeah, no shit, dude. If you shut down the energy supply overnight, people won't have a clue how to replace it. Even renewables require so many raw materials that the whole world can never be saved like in some fantasy utopia. Who would have thought that, dude?
For example, you could tear out the entire grid and rebuild it. It wouldn't be fucking impossible. The thing is, it costs a ton of shit. So why would you do that? Because some old fart with magical thinking makes all natural gas extremely expensive? Holy shit.
"Can you imagine, for example, what it would be like for a western city of even a million people to become uninhabitable, either permanently or for a few months"
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is a partial example. The city of New Orleans flooded except for the sliver higher grounds along the Mississippi River when the original settlement began. The other 80% was inundated. It took 5 years to mostly restore the city. Adjacent Jefferson Parish, which included the airport, had minimal flooding but was mostly uninhabitable for months.
The dystopian scenes in the days following of the Super Dome and Convention Center are no longer news, but not forgotten by sensible individuals. Government pretends everything is OK, in spite of repeated abysmal responses, most recently Hurricane Helene in 2024 in Florida and North Carolina.
Kagan likened the West to a garden which Borrel picked up on in an earthly delights sort of a way, as opposed to the other which lurked in the dark threatening jungle, which increasingly refused to give up the resources that in particular Europe has looted to sustain itself for roughly 500 years while bleeding itself dry through bad management, short term policies, disastrously expensive wars & insatiable greed.
We will now pay a high price for not nurturing the garden which through degradation becomes increasingly barren while lacking the means & the know how needed to revitalise it. The party is over & we should expect the killer of a hangover - as Leonard put it " Here it is ".
I didn't bother to read it all because I was offput by the first few paragraphs where it became clear the lexicon was the traditional. 'The West' is used at once in two different ways. It means, when talking about things that are thought and done, planned etc, reactions to the past and so on - that handful of lunatic monsters that direct such events. It takes no account whatever of the people in this sense.
On the other hand the fates of all the people are subsumed in any predicted wars, man made cataclysms, etc, even assessments of capability in economic terms or warfare for instance.
So on the one hand we have it implied that the thoughts, wishes, attitudes of all the people are included in our 'analysis' and on the other hand it is clear they are nowhere represented.
Except, of course, when it becomes for a while unavoidable: like popular revolutions.
But overall this is the way history and even contemporary affairs are judged, assessed, explained, predicted by our pundits.
It is happening today.
It happens everywhere.
It is not helpful, it is not true.
When they discuss what, say, 'France' did in the eighteenth orl Portugal in the sixteenth or Egypt in the first it is all about what the rulers did with as much disregard of the people as they could get away with.
When they discuss what is happening today in Europe, Ukraine, America, it is precisely the same.
Well, ostensibly the people in the 'west' generally live in 'democracies' where the 'rulers' are 'elected' by the wishes of the 'people'. If the people undertook the effort to make themselves aware of what is going on they presumably would not have elected to be part of such an obviously easily corrupted and biased system.
I find it hard to understand what you are trying to say.
You begin by mocking the idea that rulers are elected in democracies in the west by putting in quotes each word.
Then you seem to say that on the basis the idea is real, not a mockery the people would not have elected to be part of the system.
Overall it seems to me your main point is somewhere in 'if the people undertook'.
But that's as far as I can get.
I'll take a wild guess and say you're blaming the people for the mess they're in.
I can agree with that.
With caveats regarding their right to expect help and guidance from those who's job it is to provide it and those who simply claim it as their right. Everyone from 'elected reps' down through the whole chain to the local activist with a bee in his bonnet.
And in that respect I claim they've been badly let down and are let down to this day.
Here is a simple illustration I ran across yesterday:
A piece on the web claimed a majority of americans are in favour of greater efforts
against Russia. Even to outright boots on the ground war, I think.
The result of poll.
A poll the results of which the us govt is very interested in and many pundits, too.
O.k ? Point is: the will of the people is significant to govt etc. apparently. We can see that.
Next point: democracy is supposedly all about the will of the people.
Next point: the will of the people is very imperfectly transmitted in our current system which is archaic.
Next point: hence we'd expect a continuing effort to find a better way and in fact that's kinda what unofficial polls are doing.
Next point; there is a way and has been for some time: a voting 'app'.
Final point: you never heard any pollie or pundit, observers, commentator, analyst, whatever, point in that direction did you?
See? Let down. Totally.
And returning to the point I tried to make in my original post: keeping the narrative in terms of 'nations' just the same as keeping it in terms of 'limited liability companies' or 'corporations' is similarly letting them down. For it hides the fact that there are no 'companies' or 'corporations', they are legal fictions for convenience but they have no real existence.
Similarly with these 'nations' in terms of which the whole narrative, contemporary and historical, is couched.
I'm not sure why you are confused, as it is kind of obvious. Maybe you are a US citizen? The whole idea of democracy is first of all a con practised by the rich on the poor. However, the 'con' is not absolutely watertight, as it includes an element of illusory 'choice' for the poor to help the medicine go down. According to the 'rules' the people can in theory elect whoever they like. However, another part of the 'con' is to bias and control the education system and the 'news' in order to discourage and demonise independent or subversive thought. If the worst comes to the worst, the Army or National Guard can always be called in (as at Peterloo and Kent State University). The problem comes at this point - people can use the power of their own minds to rise above the propaganda, but mostly, they do not bother, as the rich presume they will not.
So the whole thing is a sort of pyramid scheme which has perpetuated itself for five or six thousand years now in various places. The majority of people are indeed to blame for accepting this state of affairs, although there are valid excuses, such as having hostages to fortune in the form of husbands/wives, children, homes, the difficulty of surviving and providing for these if you lack a secure job and income and so on. This calculation is of course part of the whole 'con'.
Generally, the only way of subverting this system is when the hostages to fortune are directly threatened by some kind of breakdown in society, and the consequences of revolting are possibly less than that of staying put in the system.
(By 'poor' I mean anyone who is not able to control most of the aspects [especially financial] of their own lives, and are thus manipulated by others).
" the people can in theory elect whoever they like."
No. They can only select from among the candidates offered to them. All of whom have been preselected to only present an allowed range of options. All of whom are deeply compromised, and thralls to the Cabal, or if you prefer the "deep state". Read, for instance https://annas-archive.org/md5/5967a5e571548cf8dec233a6e7d1c1f3
Yes, indeed, you are right. Perhaps I should have said 'whoever they like to accept within the available choices. But there is 'in theory' nothing to prevent the people from putting up their own candidates, too.
The 'whole idea' of democracy is certainly not 'a con'. It the opposite. It is an attempt to see that we all get a voice.
Perhaps you are referring not to democracy but to today's american system, which is not democratic but merely pretends to be.
Whether the reason people accept the state of affairs excuses them or not I don't know. But here it is:
The number one reason is the people assume the people running the show know what they are doing and are good,, honest, truthful people.
We are accustomed to having all work done by competent trained people. We get plumbers, electricians, tradesmen of all kinds and they do skilled work faithfully for us, in the main. Is the most common example.
We naturally assume the govt is staffed by the same kind of people: people good at their trade.
And it is, sort of. The govt Deparments are largely staffed by well trained conscientious honest capable people. Else we'd be a third world country and our services and infrastructure would be collapsing.
The trouble is that the politicians are an exception to this rule. They are not trained, they are not expert, they are not honest, they are not well meaning and they are not held to account.
So there is our failing. We fail to take that into account.
Now that is not a system that needs subverting. This is a failure of our oversight. Is all.
"Perhaps you are referring not to democracy but to today's american system, which is not democratic but merely pretends to be."
Most (all?) 'western' democracies are just the same in basic intent, as the 'American' (USA) system. It's just more obvious in the US, where no effort is made to conceal the predominance of very large sums of money in elections.
Further, our system of 'democracy' would be called 'plutocracy' if you described it in ancient Athens at the time of Socrates. What they called 'democracy' is what we now call 'sortition' i.e, one vote per person per topic.
"Some things are actually impossible to visualise: our own death is the classic example. But some things are just bigger and more complex than our brains are capable of processing, and the likely progressive disintegration of the world system is one of them”.
An American professor friend attending a health conference in Beijing met the Chinese health minister and, at the behest of a fellow academic of Chinese extraction, the whereabouts of an imprisoned academic.
"I don't think you understand what I do here", replied the Minister. "My first task is to see that 4 billion meals get served every day without anyone being sickened or killed by tainted ingredients. My second is to clean up the shit that follows. After that, I attend to urgent issues”.
The reason the flu season was bad is because the mRNA vaccines have destroyed our immune system. We have all become spike protein factories. Our governments should be telling us to take vitamin D supplements to support our immune systems.
The vast majority of us are deficient. Many are critically deficient.
Kind of ironic that an article focused on magical thinking engages in its own form of magical thinking. Correlation is not causation. You had a bad flu season, but to assume lack of vaccination was the cause is just an assumption. Besides which, if not fully sterilizing, vaccination will drive viral variations, so apart from the problem of choosing the strain we're vaccinating against, we may be making matters worse by driving variation of the very thing we're trying to prevent. Not a winning strategy, except for the makers of vaccines.
"Our governments should be telling us to take vitamin D supplements to support our immune systems."
Exactly. Zinc also, which most people are deficient in. Not once however, in the entire covid fiasco did I hear any govt. agency or health institute make that recommendation. They also lied to us about the effectiveness of repurposed drugs and went as far as to threaten the doctors and scientists recommending that approach, even though the 'vaccines' were still a year away. Two of those recommended drugs are so safe that there was no justification at all for not trying them, even if they didn't help much, since there was nothing else available at the time, and repurposing drugs is (or was) the standard approach to dealing with a novel pathogen.
Given all the lies we were told by nearly every party to the covid fiasco, why should we ever trust them again?
Through the whole covid fiasco I was helped immensely by several doctors I found on youtube. Dr John Campbell was an avid proponent of the mRNA vaccine, until he started to see the data on vaccine injuries and excess deaths. His videos with professors of oncology and immunology are extremely troubling. The Doctor at meregenomics has discussed the intricacies of frameshifting and refocusing of igg4 antibodies, as well as the origins of turbo cancers in many videos.Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity pointed out back in 2020 that the furin cleveage site was a clear indication that the covid virus was man made. I also subscribed to Pierre Kory, the author of The War on Ivermectin. Dr Campbell has many videos on ivermectin and fenbendazole. Not only do these antiparasitic drugs have strong anti viral properties,
they are also showing extraordinary promise against many cancers. Check out his videos on fenben and ivermectin.
The only silver lining to covid for me is that, thanks to these brave doctors, who were often heavily censored, I discovered the importance of vitamin D and other supplements. I have been taking zinc with quercetin, nattokinase, NAC, melatonin
and bromelain as well as 12,000 ui of vitamin D.
Once or twice a week I take ivermectin. Since early 2020 I have not been sick for one single day. I was on a boat in Antarctica when almost all the passengers and crew came down with covid, but I had no symptoms.
Since I travel a lot, I was forced to get three mRNA jabs. Unlike many people I
admit that this was a huge error on my part.
For those who do not believe that the virus causes harm, I show them the data on ourwordindata excess mortality, and they are shocked.
Since early 2022, when the pandemic was effectively over, countries in Eastern Europe
where the average vaccine per person was just above 1, excess deaths are barely above zero.
In the USA, where the vaccine rate is about 2.4 per person, the excess deaths are around 9%.
In Western Europe, Canada , Australia and New Zealand, where the vaccine rates are
around 2.7 per person, the excess mortality is around 15%.
In the most highly vaccinated countries of Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Chile
where the average vaccine rate is over 3 per person, the excess mortality is running well over 20 %. This is unheard of outside of times of war.
Unfortunately there no signs that excess mortality is coming down.
One other person to follow is Dr Kevin Mckernan. He was the head of the human genome project at MIT. He is finding extraordinarily high levels of DNA fragments in the Pfizer vaccine, along with the promoter SV 40 which is known to promote cancer. My advice is to get on the supplements I mentioned, and stay on them.
They also appear to attack the spike protein in people with long covid.
In Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand
Why the absolutely impossible to ignore truths you have described here has been ignored is one of the great mysteries of our time. Wiser minds than mine have written about this wisdom-deficit since before I was born, and I'm 76. Even in my pre-teens, I saw something of this and gravitated to thinkers who did also. As it is, I think of myself in this life as one of the "martyroi" or "witnesses." Forced to watch a horrific catastrophe unfold stage-by-stage and powerless to alter it in any way. Breathe in. Breathe out. Best I can do, I'm afraid. Kudos to you for outlining these truths so powerfully.
I feel very similarly to you. I am 80, and what I have witnessed unfolding has been simply dumbfounding.
I am 88 and I agree in full with eachn of you.
Me too - same generation. Is it a condition?
It is generational. We have watched it happen. I fancied myself an existentialist in the 1950s when it was all the rage. It has been at least in the back of my mind since. Aurelien wrote two essays about it, A Philosophy for Really Hard Times and I am persuaded he has something. All this is preamble to two points. We have watched the decline of leadership and competence since we were kids. FDR, Churchill, De Gaulle, Stalin were competent leaders surrounded by people who actually knew how to do things. Engineers, electrical, mechanical, or chemical, were leaders in their fields and leaders of industry. Working men had a variety of skills and a well of ingenuity. If something broke down, they fixed it and only if it was beyond their "fix" did they call for help. To where did that attitude disappear? I think it left for China with the Western industrial base to be replaced by "computer jockeys" who know how to ride that "horse"only as long as it stays on the track they habitually follow. That is unfair to all those who wrote the programs and provide tech support, but you take my meaning. Financial "engineering" and a financialized economy is no substitute for the real thing. We had our "birthright" whisked out from under us by flimflam artists and robber barons redux.
I jumped the gun and posted before stating my point about existentialism. Camus was asked what does one do when faced with an absurd world.If this world is not absurd, it is chock full of absurdities. What is one to do? Camus's answer, continue, just go on without hope and without despair. Or, to paraphrase, keep shoveling and do not expect to a pony in that pile of horse manure
And me. The generation of politicians who served in WWII were forced to be competent, or die. They had a fully rounded picture of the world. Since then, the Neo-Liberals have taken over, destroyed the education system and privatised the economy into the hands of similar value-free and competence-free legalised and sanctimonious criminals.
I agree 💯
You have touched on existential threats that most of us either outside of any power structure or simply a servant to them will have become familiar with emotionally grappling with as our ruling class have become deluded by the opiate of wealth. As necessity is the mother of invention it is only once enough of the world’s human populations inevitably permanently lose their second gilded age creature comforts that any cultural recreation will be seeded. Until then it is our lot to endure this shrinking of human imaginations and the degradation of place.
The dominative narrative, as pointed out includes, along with its associated trappings, renaming short-sighted to short-term, and then rushing off, the rest of the world in tow, with not the slightest idea of where/what a finish line even is.
Perhaps, I too am falling for the seductive, short-term, 'do something' syndrome so well described in this article, but I do have a belief that the answers to such problems, we are currently facing, due to their size and complexity, are not solvable by any one person, or even by individual organizations, but rather through extensive and deep organizing among and between them.
Helpful nswers can come from anyone, and many ones. Being connected, vocal, strategizing while seeking effective tactics, and yes, acting, are all important in counteracting the dominant narrative. How do we do that organizing?
My reading of the archeological record and history is that the only organizational structure capable of achieving what you propose has been religion. I don't see much appetite for that sort of thing just now, but a calamity big enough might see a resurgence of interest. Christianity is a desert weed, after all ...
Unfortunately, Christianity is among the most intellectually and logically unsatisfactory religions (along with Islam and Judaism). Far better would be one of the Indian or Chinese religions. Even Wicca would be better - at least you might get naked dancing round a campfire! 😳
The succes of a religion is not intellectual or logical. It is the capacity of put together diferents behaviors of society through symbolism. In this case, most of religions (if not all) tend to orient their symbols to the future and create a conformist and dogmatic basic that is capable ob keep social cohesion. Moral acts in a similar way (nationalism, for exemple, that gives to the elites a future goal and a direction). I am atheist, and the idea of God is contradictorial and easily deniable; it is false its existence. However, I appreciate the multiple functions of religions in different spheres (social and individual).
If your 'idea of god' is contradictory and easily deniable, then you have not considered the question in sufficient detail. Of course the idea of a 'father in the sky' whose main desire is to be worshipped, is a ludicrous - even insane idea. But there is much more to the idea than that. I don't personally believe in 'god', but he/she/it is not so easily dismissed.
I mean this: omnipotence, the problem of unnecessary evil and the goodness of God, the problem of the creation of God (if he creates, ¿who create it him?), the studies in atropology that shows that religions evolve from a zoomorfism, to antropomorfism until more abstract ways of conceiving Gods and so on... It is a contradictorily idea, at least in the usual forms of Theology.
It is not a naïve deniable of God. It is base on philosophy and works from other people that I've heard or read.
Heaven forbid!
Any such altruistic endeavour, and agreed, solutions to our complex societal crises can only ever be found through a complex of different voices, and only be initiated once those mature enough to be confident that they are able to think through complex patterns, find each other. Such a group would be able to jettison any of the vast tribe of hot little monkeys on the make who mimic competency.
As this is an organic process its emergence will be unpredictable.
My view is that you resort to magical thinking when real reforms involve subverting your "state ideology," a set of beliefs that holds your society and the legitimacy of the government together. This is not necessarily an Anglo Saxon thing: there are several tons of history that addresses why China failed to modernize in mid to late 19th century as Japan did--and the magical thinking plays a huge part in that story. Their idea was that Western power depended only on the "tactics" and techniques, which could be bought and paid for, but the ultimate goal was to not change anything about the China that was. So millions upon millions went to buying Western arms and ships and hiring alleged Western experts, but with a wilful and deliberate ignorance about how these fit into (non existent) Chinese vision of where it stood in the world--you can't have a vision if your goal is that you don't want to be part of the world that you didn't like, where you are not the center of the universe. Ultimately, the whole thing came to the spectacle where discontented and unhappy masses recruited to cause trouble on promise of literal magic, the so-called Boxers who were told that a combination of Taoist mysticism and Chinese martial arts could somehow neutralize Western technology, because every reform attempt that didn't subvert the state ideology failed. While in a different form, we can almost see the outline of the Western Boxers being mobilized by Empress Dowager Trump on the promise of Capitalist mysticism and Anglo Saxon enterpreneurship that could somehow neutralize the Easterners.
The funny thing, of course, is that, back in old China, too, the politics were cast in a false dualism: the obscurantists rallying to the Boxers vs enlightened and rational "Westernizers." The truth was, of course, different: the real alternative to the Boxers that could actually appeal to the Chinese were various nationalist reformers, most of whom definitely were not exactly "friends of the West," even if they didn't reject Western ideas out of hand, ranging from Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. But it took a whole century for them to sort things out (and the process is still ongoing, in fact.) Things will stay in flux for a long time in the West as well and I don't relish the thought.
Very good. I give you a complement: ¿why these ideas opposed to the ones sustained by the State are attacked or denied?
Because these ideas, usually (not always) ara defended by other groups of population that could threat the hegemony of ruling elites (or economical, or cultural elites). I don't know about China, but you can see (repite: I don't know, this is based on a couple of readings) how they attacked the "western ideas" that were sustained, or could be used, by economical elites that could threatened the ruling class. Today, it happen the same: the ideas could threat the position of economical and ruling elites in Western countries.
This one was powerful. It does deserve 3 coffees, or I feel it does.
Please post it on all subreditts dedicated to public servants. I say it as a public servant myself.
Working on issues related with climate change impact on public health, I refused to deal with food security, knowing beforehand that health has no available information, nor agriculture, and that most/all of food production, processing, transport, distribution is in private hands, so I was in no mood to go on wild geese chases. Rumors of the first working group meeting in the undisclosed area fully confirmed my gut feeling and kind of fell under the umbrella of this essay. Scarry as hell.
Humans survive hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands, generally staying within limits. We put rulers in charge and it's just been ten thousand years of overgrowth, misery, slavery, and collapse. I'm starting to think that maybe we're better off running our own lives without rulers.
1. The West in general and the US in particular has been able to half-ass planning because it has been able to rely upon brute force, and to hell with the consequences, those are for the little people to deal with.
2. "Consider, for example, the contrast between the US construction of an international alliance for Gulf War 1,0 and the political shambles of its successor. Whatever you think of the earlier episode, it was skilfully and professionally carried out, and had a simple strategic objective: the creation of a wide international coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. By contrast, the second episode was pure magical thinking, whereby an invasion would “create the conditions” for a peaceful, democratic pro-American state."
Simply turning Iraq into a failed state was seen as a win, but this could not be said out loud.
3. "Or consider the difference between the shambles of Brexit and the management on the British side of the 1991 European Union negotiations. Whatever you think of British objectives in 1991, they were largely achieved, because the government machine, though weakened, was still capable of acting effectively and turning political aspirations into specific activities. By 2016-19 that machine had largely been destroyed, and even had it not been, the capability for strategic thought had pretty much disappeared from the higher reaches of government. Boris Johnson seemed to think that he could just wave a magic wand and the problem would be resolved."
The UK simply outsourced its military to the United States, following its American Master around like the little yappy dog that follows Spike The Bulldog in the Looney Tunes cartoons.
Anyway, I have read the theory that the real reason Johnson got cracking with Brexit was to preserve the Five Eyes relationship between MI 6 and the US. FULL DISCLOSURE: I have no idea and express no opinion whether or to what extent there is any truth in this.
You argue that the collapse of the West is the result of a lack of strategic thinking attributable to growing infantilism of politicians, and so, broadly speaking, to stupidity, rather than malice.
But there IS strategic thinking underlying the dystopia, and long-term planning IS taking place. The point is, this is /malignant/ planning, engineering the collapse. For an instance relating to the food crisis you are observing, read: https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/global-war-on-farming These policies are not haphazard at all, and not short-term-profit driven. Depopulation by starvation seems to be the deliberate goal. A similar case might be made for many other policies; read for instance: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/09/investigative-reports/sustainable-debt-slavery/
As for the politicians being stupid, this is again not a chance outcome, but an engineered negative selection. The qualities sought are, first, a lack of conscience; second, susceptibility to kompromat, which is usually deliberately induced ( https://annas-archive.org/md5/5967a5e571548cf8dec233a6e7d1c1f3 ); and third, incompetence, especially with regard to one's area of decision-making. It is that last aspect that you are observing. The negative selection is no longer done unofficially within political organizations, but through global cadre organizations such as the YGL: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/08/investigative-reports/the-kissinger-continuum-the-unauthorized-history-of-the-wefs-young-global-leaders-program/
Why are the stooges, counterintuitively, required to be incompetent? Firstly, so that they do not realize the long-term consequences of the decisions they are prompted to make; but more importantly so that, afraid of exposing their ignorance, they rely for all their decisions on the guidance and instruction of shadow advisors. This was evident in the Covid crisis, where any change of course came slowly and haphazardly, with some "decisionmakers" still following yesterday's slogans until their handlers got around to redirecting them; and the media got fed the new "line" last of all, and so lagged behind changes of policy.
For an incisive diagnosis of the mental disorder affecting today's political stooges, read this brilliant article by a psychologist: https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/what-is-wrong-with-the-western-political
I am trying to fight the feeling that it is only my advancing age that makes me embrace this spiel - but it's more than that. I worked in Local Government and ran redevelopment schemes and we achieved things but they took time, organisation and skill. Local Government has been hollowed out now. And there seems to be little practical training remaining. How I envy the Chinese. If I was young again that's where I'd want to be. I am sick to death of our erstaz democracy - fetishised as a thing in itself. We need stability strategic planning and skill - and it has gone. In the past it was achieved only by the mainstream parties all basically agreeing with each other but that has been shattered by the reality of living in a word of 'financialisation' which is about to collapse. I saw it coming a couple of decades ago and retired to the hills. I am kept alive only by curiosity as to how things will turn out.
The West’s almost-complete lack of strategic thinking and planning capacity applies to the whole of the ecological crisis, including the climate crisis
1.339 / 5.000
What a waste of time, old man.
Yeah, exactly, it's all far too complicated for people to understand, and it's not at all because people are fed 24/7 propaganda by economic interests and they deliberately absorb it because they don't give a damn about other people's problems.
You can't imagine what it's like when cities with millions of inhabitants become uninhabitable? Look at Ukraine.
You can't imagine how they deal with millions of refugees?
Look at Jordan with their refugee camps cross-financed by Europe or the Greeks https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fortress-greece
As if the West ever gave a damn about the suffering and hunger in the world, it's that complicated.
Yeah, no shit, dude. If you shut down the energy supply overnight, people won't have a clue how to replace it. Even renewables require so many raw materials that the whole world can never be saved like in some fantasy utopia. Who would have thought that, dude?
For example, you could tear out the entire grid and rebuild it. It wouldn't be fucking impossible. The thing is, it costs a ton of shit. So why would you do that? Because some old fart with magical thinking makes all natural gas extremely expensive? Holy shit.
"Can you imagine, for example, what it would be like for a western city of even a million people to become uninhabitable, either permanently or for a few months"
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is a partial example. The city of New Orleans flooded except for the sliver higher grounds along the Mississippi River when the original settlement began. The other 80% was inundated. It took 5 years to mostly restore the city. Adjacent Jefferson Parish, which included the airport, had minimal flooding but was mostly uninhabitable for months.
The dystopian scenes in the days following of the Super Dome and Convention Center are no longer news, but not forgotten by sensible individuals. Government pretends everything is OK, in spite of repeated abysmal responses, most recently Hurricane Helene in 2024 in Florida and North Carolina.
Kagan likened the West to a garden which Borrel picked up on in an earthly delights sort of a way, as opposed to the other which lurked in the dark threatening jungle, which increasingly refused to give up the resources that in particular Europe has looted to sustain itself for roughly 500 years while bleeding itself dry through bad management, short term policies, disastrously expensive wars & insatiable greed.
We will now pay a high price for not nurturing the garden which through degradation becomes increasingly barren while lacking the means & the know how needed to revitalise it. The party is over & we should expect the killer of a hangover - as Leonard put it " Here it is ".
https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/bosch-garden-of-earthly-delights-featured-2.jpg
I didn't bother to read it all because I was offput by the first few paragraphs where it became clear the lexicon was the traditional. 'The West' is used at once in two different ways. It means, when talking about things that are thought and done, planned etc, reactions to the past and so on - that handful of lunatic monsters that direct such events. It takes no account whatever of the people in this sense.
On the other hand the fates of all the people are subsumed in any predicted wars, man made cataclysms, etc, even assessments of capability in economic terms or warfare for instance.
So on the one hand we have it implied that the thoughts, wishes, attitudes of all the people are included in our 'analysis' and on the other hand it is clear they are nowhere represented.
Except, of course, when it becomes for a while unavoidable: like popular revolutions.
But overall this is the way history and even contemporary affairs are judged, assessed, explained, predicted by our pundits.
It is happening today.
It happens everywhere.
It is not helpful, it is not true.
When they discuss what, say, 'France' did in the eighteenth orl Portugal in the sixteenth or Egypt in the first it is all about what the rulers did with as much disregard of the people as they could get away with.
When they discuss what is happening today in Europe, Ukraine, America, it is precisely the same.
It is ludicrously wrong.
Well, ostensibly the people in the 'west' generally live in 'democracies' where the 'rulers' are 'elected' by the wishes of the 'people'. If the people undertook the effort to make themselves aware of what is going on they presumably would not have elected to be part of such an obviously easily corrupted and biased system.
I find it hard to understand what you are trying to say.
You begin by mocking the idea that rulers are elected in democracies in the west by putting in quotes each word.
Then you seem to say that on the basis the idea is real, not a mockery the people would not have elected to be part of the system.
Overall it seems to me your main point is somewhere in 'if the people undertook'.
But that's as far as I can get.
I'll take a wild guess and say you're blaming the people for the mess they're in.
I can agree with that.
With caveats regarding their right to expect help and guidance from those who's job it is to provide it and those who simply claim it as their right. Everyone from 'elected reps' down through the whole chain to the local activist with a bee in his bonnet.
And in that respect I claim they've been badly let down and are let down to this day.
Here is a simple illustration I ran across yesterday:
A piece on the web claimed a majority of americans are in favour of greater efforts
against Russia. Even to outright boots on the ground war, I think.
The result of poll.
A poll the results of which the us govt is very interested in and many pundits, too.
O.k ? Point is: the will of the people is significant to govt etc. apparently. We can see that.
Next point: democracy is supposedly all about the will of the people.
Next point: the will of the people is very imperfectly transmitted in our current system which is archaic.
Next point: hence we'd expect a continuing effort to find a better way and in fact that's kinda what unofficial polls are doing.
Next point; there is a way and has been for some time: a voting 'app'.
https://abrogard.com/blog/2023/12/25/dont-write-to-congress/
Final point: you never heard any pollie or pundit, observers, commentator, analyst, whatever, point in that direction did you?
See? Let down. Totally.
And returning to the point I tried to make in my original post: keeping the narrative in terms of 'nations' just the same as keeping it in terms of 'limited liability companies' or 'corporations' is similarly letting them down. For it hides the fact that there are no 'companies' or 'corporations', they are legal fictions for convenience but they have no real existence.
Similarly with these 'nations' in terms of which the whole narrative, contemporary and historical, is couched.
I'm not sure why you are confused, as it is kind of obvious. Maybe you are a US citizen? The whole idea of democracy is first of all a con practised by the rich on the poor. However, the 'con' is not absolutely watertight, as it includes an element of illusory 'choice' for the poor to help the medicine go down. According to the 'rules' the people can in theory elect whoever they like. However, another part of the 'con' is to bias and control the education system and the 'news' in order to discourage and demonise independent or subversive thought. If the worst comes to the worst, the Army or National Guard can always be called in (as at Peterloo and Kent State University). The problem comes at this point - people can use the power of their own minds to rise above the propaganda, but mostly, they do not bother, as the rich presume they will not.
So the whole thing is a sort of pyramid scheme which has perpetuated itself for five or six thousand years now in various places. The majority of people are indeed to blame for accepting this state of affairs, although there are valid excuses, such as having hostages to fortune in the form of husbands/wives, children, homes, the difficulty of surviving and providing for these if you lack a secure job and income and so on. This calculation is of course part of the whole 'con'.
Generally, the only way of subverting this system is when the hostages to fortune are directly threatened by some kind of breakdown in society, and the consequences of revolting are possibly less than that of staying put in the system.
(By 'poor' I mean anyone who is not able to control most of the aspects [especially financial] of their own lives, and are thus manipulated by others).
" the people can in theory elect whoever they like."
No. They can only select from among the candidates offered to them. All of whom have been preselected to only present an allowed range of options. All of whom are deeply compromised, and thralls to the Cabal, or if you prefer the "deep state". Read, for instance https://annas-archive.org/md5/5967a5e571548cf8dec233a6e7d1c1f3
Yes, indeed, you are right. Perhaps I should have said 'whoever they like to accept within the available choices. But there is 'in theory' nothing to prevent the people from putting up their own candidates, too.
Well there's a lot that's wrong there.
The 'whole idea' of democracy is certainly not 'a con'. It the opposite. It is an attempt to see that we all get a voice.
Perhaps you are referring not to democracy but to today's american system, which is not democratic but merely pretends to be.
Whether the reason people accept the state of affairs excuses them or not I don't know. But here it is:
The number one reason is the people assume the people running the show know what they are doing and are good,, honest, truthful people.
We are accustomed to having all work done by competent trained people. We get plumbers, electricians, tradesmen of all kinds and they do skilled work faithfully for us, in the main. Is the most common example.
We naturally assume the govt is staffed by the same kind of people: people good at their trade.
And it is, sort of. The govt Deparments are largely staffed by well trained conscientious honest capable people. Else we'd be a third world country and our services and infrastructure would be collapsing.
The trouble is that the politicians are an exception to this rule. They are not trained, they are not expert, they are not honest, they are not well meaning and they are not held to account.
So there is our failing. We fail to take that into account.
Now that is not a system that needs subverting. This is a failure of our oversight. Is all.
"Perhaps you are referring not to democracy but to today's american system, which is not democratic but merely pretends to be."
Most (all?) 'western' democracies are just the same in basic intent, as the 'American' (USA) system. It's just more obvious in the US, where no effort is made to conceal the predominance of very large sums of money in elections.
Further, our system of 'democracy' would be called 'plutocracy' if you described it in ancient Athens at the time of Socrates. What they called 'democracy' is what we now call 'sortition' i.e, one vote per person per topic.
You torching your credibility with the assumption that flu vaccines always work. They don’t. Modern medicine is not magic.