#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
DON QUIXOTE Episodes 1 and 2: In a Village of La Mancha
HOW TO SUCCEED LIKE A DARK LORD Episode 11: Literally…
SAVAGE MEMES Episode 70: NASA
REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 10: The Wrong Answer
Arktoons is very pleased to announce the launch today of DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA, a toon newly translated from the original Spanish comic by Wise Path Books. Like Castalia Library, Arkhaven Comics is committed to the preservation of the Western canon.
For some reason, those who declare everyone should “trust the science” and “listen to the experts” absolutely refuse to listen to actual epidemoiologists, public health scientists, and Israeli academics:
In the end, the truth will always be revealed, and the truth about the coronavirus policy is beginning to be revealed. When the destructive concepts collapse one by one, there is nothing left but to tell the experts who led the management of the pandemic – we told you so.Two years late, you finally realize that a respiratory virus cannot be defeated and that any such attempt is doomed to fail. You do not admit it, because you have admitted almost no mistake in the last two years, but in retrospect it is clear that you have failed miserably in almost all of your actions, and even the media is already having a hard time covering your shame….
You refused to adopt the “Barrington Declaration”, signed by more than 60,000 scientists and medical professionals, or other common sense programs. You chose to ridicule, slander, distort and discredit them. Instead of the right programs and people, you have chosen professionals who lack relevant training for pandemic management.
THE GREAT BARRINGTON DECLARATION
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.
Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.
As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals.
Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.
Scott Adams could benefit from some of the best advice ever given to Garrison Keillor:
Every time Chet came on the show, he’d sit backstage and jam with Paul and whoever wanted to join in, Johnny Gimble, Bill Hinkley, Howard Levy with a harmonica, Peter Ostroushko, and the tunes would flow along from old-time to swing, one tune emerging into another, “Just as I Am” into “Stardust,” Stephen Foster, George Harrison, “Seeing Nellie Home,” “Banks of the Ohio,” and maybe Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Boudleaux Bryant, “Freight Train,” one sparkling stream, it was all music to him. He held his guitar like a father holds a child, he was happy, the genuine article. He loved jamming backstage, where he wasn’t obligated to be Chet Atkins and could be a man in a crowd of friends. He had made his way in the country music business though his real love was jazz, and when he sat backstage with the others, a sweet equality prevailed in which strangers were old friends—the music made it so.
I envied that and asked Chet once if I should learn to play guitar and he said, “The world does not need another mediocre guitarist. Stick with the monologue. Nobody else does what you do.” So I did.
Chet gave me good advice: “Never read anything anybody writes about you. No matter what they write, you won’t learn anything from it, and you’ll probably read something that’ll be a stone in your shoe for months to come.” I could see the reasoning, which was the same as what LaVona Person told me in the eighth grade: It’s not about you. It’s about the material. Don’t make it be about you.
That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life, Garrison Keillor
The world does not need another mediocre political commentator, Scott. You’re not a great predictor. You’re not a great persuader. You’re not a great podcaster. You’re not a great hypnotist. You’re not an economist.
You’re a great cartoonist, one of the greatest ever. Stick with the cartoons.
Take the booster that he’s pushing and you’ll have even less protection and an even more severely damaged immune system.
FLYING SPARKS Episode 38: Send a Message
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 42: Pops Culture
PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 8: This Dreadful Desolate Forest
CLASSIC BIBLE TALES Episode 38: Conversation with Nicodemus
And elevate for excellence. Bill Belichick’s system illustrates the effort and the level of detail that are required to set yourself apart, even among the most successful:
As the son of a coach, and a lifelong football devotee, Brian Ferentz figured he could handle every possible expectation that came with his new job as a low-level offensive assistant in New England. He would live the Patriots’ infamous 20/20 coaching existence, working up to 20 hours a day, for about $20,000 a year. He knew he would become an anonymous cog in a high-functioning machine, spending his days—and most nights—swamped in grunt work while receiving little credit for his toiling. But he also knew he had gained entry to a coaching laboratory that could change the trajectory of his life, starting in 2009.
He expected it would be hard. He didn’t expect … an art project? But the team assigned him the NFL equivalent of one, immediately. Bill Belichick summoned Ferentz to his office, where he’d school him on one particular—and particularly tedious—process that New England emphasized more than any other team. Belichick called it “padding,” his method of diagramming plays from opponents. It served to gauge football knowledge, inform game plans and teach the nuances of an infinitely complex sport—part torture chamber, part proving ground, part barrier to entry and part football seminar all wrapped into one exercise.
Every NFL team charts its opposition, on some level, to varying degrees. And other coaches, like Bill Parcells, made their entry-level assistants pad. But while those familiar with the process claim not to know its origin—whether it started with Parcells; Belichick; Belichick’s father, Steve; top-secret Patriots assistant Ernie Adams; or elsewhere—all agree that no one embraced the method, or gleaned more value from it, than Belichick himself.
Ferentz understood the extent immediately. Two words popped into his mind: “holy” and “s—.” A man who once considered himself ready for every nuance of the job was now doubting whether he could do it. He would scour film of upcoming opponents and diagram their offensive plays in staggering detail, then take those diagrams, cut them out, place them into booklets and hand them over for review. Some games took eight hours, depending on the number of plays and the complexity of the scheme, while others could be completed in closer to four. With four or five games to review each week, his mass of other responsibilities and actual coaching, he started to add up the math for a 17-week season, only to stop because he had to pad again.
The “pads” were sheets of paper, 8½ x 11 inches, with a horizontal line dividing the page. They sketched one diagram on top and the other on the bottom. The assistants filled in four plays on each sheet by using both sides. They noted the down and distance; field position, quarter and time remaining; numbers for each of the 22 players and their assignments….
Thirteen years later, Ferentz is Iowa’s offensive coordinator. He’s still a coach, and one who never expected to embrace that “miserable, terrible, awful” process that once forced him to question both his chosen profession and, at times, his existence. Instead, he came to view one specific process, from all of New England’s myriad approaches, as the primary element that built the nebulous, mystical aura known as the Patriot Way.
He’s now a padding proponent. Lifetime membership.
It’s not an accident that both JRR Tolkien and Umberto Eco demonstrated near-psychotic attention to detail in the process of creating their great literary works. Tolkien’s philological depths are rightly famous; it’s less well-known how Eco built a virtual monastery so that he could time how long it took to walk from point A to point B in order to ensure that the conversations in The Name of the Rose fit the amount of time that was required for the traversal.
My level of success is orders of magnitude below the two great writers of the 20th century, but one thing I have noticed is that a) I make a habit of writing design drafts as well as keeping lists and spreadsheets, and b) I always have a much better idea of what is going on, and what needs to be done, than nearly everyone else involved in a given project. I’m regularly astonished by how little most people know about what is required of them to simply do their jobs correctly.
So, to up your game, I highly recommend getting in the habit of writing things down and regularly noting what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, who is doing it, and when you should check on them to see if they are going to deliver it on time. Think of it as padding for life.
If you watched the Darkstream, then you know what this is all about. By request:
You know that any vaxx is capable of boosting
Scotty got it right and he’s capable of proving
He can be what he wants to be
Shoot a one shoot a two then he boosts a three
Whatever kind, he’ll max the vaxx
And if he gets it wrong he walks it back
Amphiboly proves he could never be a loser
That’s why he can shoot any booster
QUANTUM MORTIS Episode 31: Risky Action
TITAN MOUSE OF MIGHT Episode 8: The Experience
VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 33: Bridge Crossing
BEN GARRISON CLASSICS Episode 27: Internet Hate Machine
BOB & THE BOBBIES Episode 8: Comeuppance
The reason Russia is ready to invade Ukraine is extremely straightforward. It will never permit NATO’s expansion into Ukraine. And NATO has already decided to expand into both Ukraine and Georgia.
NATO decided to admit Ukraine and Georgia, but did not set a deadline, Secretary General of the organization Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview in the Repubblika newspaper.
“Ukraine has already requested to join, and we have decided to work towards this by supporting its reforms, helping to modernize the armed forces to our standards. In 2008, we decided that Ukraine and Georgia would become [NATO] members, but we did not establish, when exactly,” Stoltenberg said.
That’s why the neocons are already attempting to lay the global media narrative for the customary US false flag, which, from the Spanish-American War to the Afghan War, has been used to whip up public support for US invasions of foreign countries around the world. These justifications for military action were all fake to varying degrees. Sometimes they were complete false flags, like the Maine and 9/11. At other times they were genuine attacks that were misrepresented to the public, such as the Lusitania and Pearl Harbor. But regardless of which form the next one takes, don’t let your friends and family fall for the next one.
The position that Russia has no right to a sphere of influence is as risible as it is hypocritical when it comes from the United States. It is the USA, not Russia, that is presently the Evil Empire. It is the USA, not China, that presently plays host to what Philip K. Dick described as “the empire that never ended.”
The United States has exercised a sphere of influence in its own hemisphere for almost 200 years, since President James Monroe, in his seventh annual message to Congress, declared that the United States “should consider any attempt” by foreign powers “to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
Listening to Mr. Blinken, you might think the United States long ago deposited this prerogative over the foreign policies of its southern neighbors in history’s dustbin. It has done no such thing. In 2018, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called the Monroe Doctrine “as relevant today as it was the day it was written.” The following year, his national security adviser, John Bolton, boasted that “the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”
To be sure, the United States doesn’t enforce the Monroe Doctrine in the same way it did in the first half of the 20th century, when it regularly deployed the Marines to Central America and the Caribbean, or during the Cold War, when the C.I.A. helped topple leftist governments. Washington’s methods have changed. It now prefers using economic coercion to punish governments that ally with adversaries and challenge its regional dominion.
Consider Washington’s decades-long embargo of Cuba. U.S. officials may claim the embargo’s goal is to promote democracy, but virtually every other government on earth — democracies included — views it as an act of political bullying. Last year, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the embargo by a vote of 184 to 2. Human Rights Watch has denounced it for imposing “indiscriminate hardship on the Cuban population.”
Biden officials do not celebrate the Monroe Doctrine as their Trump administration predecessors did. But they still muscle America’s neighbors. Mr. Biden hasn’t eased the embargo of Cuba. Nor has he ended Mr. Trump’s effort to cut off Venezuela, another autocratic government that flirts with America’s foes, from global trade. The United States, in the words of one European Union official, is still prepared to “starve Venezuelans until their leadership surrender or their people oust them.” These policies serve notice to other Latin American governments that defying Washington can bring grave costs.
The Fake Biden Administration has been kind enough to warn us about the war with Russia the neocons who run it are attempting to launch:
The US has intelligence that Russia is planning a ‘false-flag’ operation on its own forces in eastern Ukraine to create a pretext for invasion.
Officials on Friday also said they believed Russia was mounting a social media disinformation campaign to portray Ukraine as the aggressor.
The update, making the prospect of military conflict more immediate, came as Ukrainian government websites were taken offline in a ‘massive’ cyberattack, talks between Washington and Moscow collapsed and Russia held a combat readiness inspection of their troops.
Meanwhile, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia had ‘run out of patience’ with the West as Moscow demanded assurances that NATO would not expand closer to its territory.
The United States has evidence that operatives trained in urban warfare and sabotage will carry out these attacks on Russian proxy forces, officials told journalists on Friday, possibly weeks before an invasion.
‘We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine,’ said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
‘The operatives are trained in urban warfare and using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces.’
She said it mimicked the playbook used when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, and included social media disinformation to show Kyiv as the instigator of violence.
Translation: The USA will be staging an obvious false flag prior to starting a war again.
Remember the Maine!
Thank goodness that Scott Adams invented and explained the new concept of projection to us earlier today, so we understand that when Jen Psaki says that Russia is going to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine, she’s actually describing what the US government is in the process of doing.
We owe him a real debt of gratitude for teaching us to see through the persuasion.