Category: Uncategorized

Trust Not in Ticket-Takers

Elon Musk bows down before the one he serves.

Elon Musk didn’t let the responsibilities of becoming CEO at a third major company curb his Halloween spirit this year. Fresh off of a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, Musk showed up on a red carpet in New York City in what appeared to be a “Devil’s Champion” costume alongside his mother, Maye Musk. Musk on Monday evening attended model Heidi Klum’s Halloween bash on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. AbracadabraNYC, a New York store that features the costume online, shows a list price of $7,500 for the “armored” red and black outfit.

Now, for the love of all that is Good, Beautiful, and True, can we PLEASE stop waxing enthusiastic for every wicked creature who happens to show signs that his commitment to evil might be slightly less than 100 percent? How many times do we have to go through the same old stupid routine?

This isn’t that hard. Evil is not good. And because evil has rival factions, not everything that opposes one evil faction is good.

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Dr. Doom Confirms WWIII

It’s rather intriguing to observe that economist Nouriel Roubini, the man who most famously predicted the financial crisis of 2008 – as did Steve Keen and I – is now also in agreement with me that WWIII has already begun and that the global economy is going to bifurcate:

Last week, the New York University professor was interviewed by Der Spiegel and listed some of the world’s most acute problems.

Recalling a recent event hosted by the International Monetary Fund, he referred to historian Niall Ferguson who “said in a speech there that we would be lucky if we got an economic crisis like in the 1970s — and not a war like in the 1940s.”

When speaking about major global threats, Roubini mentioned the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, adding that Iran and Israel are “on a collision course” as well.

“I read that the Biden administration expects China to attack Taiwan sooner rather than later,” the economist said, summarizing that “World War III has already effectively begun.”

The rivalry between Washington and Beijing is driving tension to a large degree, Roubini noted, adding that the US has banned the export of certain semiconductors to China and is pressuring European nations into cutting trade ties with the country on national security grounds. He believes that a breakup of the globalized world is looming.

“Trade, finance, technology, internet: Everything will split in two,” he predicted.

It was not clear if non-allied nations would pick the US side in the confrontation, he said. “I asked the president of an African country why he gets 5G technology from China and not from the West. He told me, we are a small country, so someone will spy on us anyway. Then, I might as well take the Chinese technology, it’s cheaper,” the economist revealed to Der Spiegel.

There simply isn’t any reason for any self-interested third party to choose the side of what Vladimir Putin describes as the Second West. Unlike the USA, which has been attacking countries, undermining their currencies, and murdering their leaders for decades, the Chinese are mostly content to simply do business with other countries. And while that may change, and the massive Chinese diaspora is not exactly popular in countries such as Indonesia, Australia, and Canada, the fact is that the Chinese track record concerning foreign relations is considerably better than that of the USA or of its representative in Asia, Japan.

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Meme of the Week

Despite the plethora of Boomer-tier memes and Dad-joke memes this week, there was strong competition in the Weekly Meme Review on UATV. This one was a little dark, but it is extremely powerful visual rhetoric that points toward the truth, which is precisely what makes a meme the Meme of the Week.

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Never to Forgive, Never to Forget

There will be no “pandemic amnesty”. Those of us who weren’t stupid enough to fall for the obvious lies of the global depopulationists, the corrupt scientists, and the media are neither going to forgive nor forget the lies that were told, the incessant attacks on us, or the price that is still being paid by our friends and family members who refused to listen to us.

When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty….

Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

There is no forgiveness without repentance. Not only is there no repentance from the pro-vaccine side, many of their lies are still being told! And the gaslighting and backpedaling by the politicians, the corporations, and the pharmaceutical companies – we never said the vaccines would prevent the transmission of COVID or forced anyone to get vaccinated – is absolutely unrepentant and unconscionable.

As Spacebunny aptly quoted Cerno, “there is no reconciliation without restitution.”

The only way to learn from mistakes is to admit them, and virtually no one who got vaccinated and/or pushed the vaccination on others is even willing to admit they were mistaken, much less repent of their foolish and hateful words. All of them will pay a price for their decisions, both physically and in terms of the way in which their decision-making capabilities will be regarded in the future. It is a price that is not only inescapable, but entirely merited.

The ongoing problems will not be solved by the people who created and exacerbated them, especially not when those people are desperate to deny their responsibility for the problems.

Never ascribe to uncertainty or error that which can be explained by malicious and satanic evil.

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