The silent war

 Someone is reportedly attacking US diplomats around the world:

The mysterious “Havana Syndrome” illness, which some intelligence officials believe might be a microwave attack by foreign actors, has claimed another 20 U.S. diplomatic and intelligence personnel victims abroad since President Joe Biden took office.

About two dozen U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and other government officials, in Vienna, Austria, are experiencing symptoms like the brain illnesses experienced by staff at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, in 2016, New Yorker magazine reported Friday.

The symptoms include hearing high-pitched sounds, steady “pulses of energy” in the head, pain, nausea, dizziness, and several other “bizarre” sensations, the WebMD website said.

The incidents continued around the globe, at a U.S. Consulate in China, a U.S. facility in Russia, as well as other countries in the Middle East, Europe, and even on U.S. soil in Washington, D.C., just miles away from the White House.

So far, officials estimate the number of victims to be more than 130, many of whom report ongoing symptoms and the inability to work, according to the site.

I’m dubious that the situation is quite as mysterious as it’s described as being by the media. As one who has read Charles Stross’s Laundry novels, I think it’s fairly apparent that these “diplomats” were dabbling in the esoteric arts and have contracted K-Syndrome as a result.

Monthly vaccine doses

What sort of “vaccine” needs to be given every single month?

Thousands of long Covid sufferers are set to be offered monthly vaccine doses in an effort to beat the debilitating illness – after reports that patients can make a dramatic recovery after a jab.

More than one million Britons are said to be suffering from long Covid, with studies suggesting 400,000 have been hit by symptoms for more than a year.

This will be the first drug trial of a long Covid treatment. 

This is looking more and more like the pharmaceutical industry imitating the antivirus industry. First they create the problem, then they sell the solution. Repeat monthly. 

Scientists have no idea

They haven’t begun to grasp how well dogs understand humans:

Dogs really are “man’s best friend” and “get” humans in a way other animals simply can’t relate to. Sorry “Game of Thrones” fans, a new study finds even the dog’s closest relatives – wolf pups – don’t gel with people the same way.

Researchers from Duke University say 14,000 years of domestication plays a big part in this. In fact, man’s best friend has actually evolved to understand human gestures and look to humans for help in a way that no other animals do.

Study authors, who compared wolf pups raised by humans to dogs who had barely any contact with people, discovered that dogs still outperform their wolf counterparts in tests of their understanding and co-operation with humans. The team behind the research adds their results show dogs instinctively understand people.

I discovered today that our dogs know what “perambulation” means. I’m not kidding. We had to find other ways to discuss the possibility of going outside for a walk without using the words “outside”, “walk”, or even “the w-word”. Saying “how do you feel about a perambulation” worked for a few weeks, until today, when one of the Ridgebacks immediately leaped to her feet and barked as soon as she heard the word, which promptly set off the rest of the pack.

I wonder how long it will take them to learn Chinese?

Post-vaccination death rates “through the roof”

A funeral director fears bodies could be left at hospitals because relatives cannot afford to instruct him during the coronavirus pandemic. Milton Keynes-based John O’Looney said Britain’s ‘lockdown’ had “affected every aspect” of his industry. 

BBC News

However, the BBC didn’t see fit to cover the director’s more recent remarks about the so-called “pandemic”:

As a funeral director I commented in a Covid video comments section exactly what my experience was firsthand during this fake pandemic last year.

The death rate was totally normal, in fact, it was a little bit down on 2019 and towards Christmas many of my colleagues were actually turning their fridges off because there was no one dying.

We began vaccinating on January 6 locally here and the death rate went through the roof almost immediately within the same week, for three months I’ve never known a death rate like it in 15 years as an undertaker. 

This comment was liked over 300 times and then my YouTube account was deleted without warning for apparently violating their policies – being honest basically.

Note that the British Health Secretary just tested positive for Covid this weekend despite being vaccinated twice. 

Sunday AM Arktoons

CHICAGO TYPEWRITER Episode 12: Back to Life

GO MONSTER GO Episode 8: It’s Coming From the Trunk

This marks the final episode of the first book of Chicago Typewriter. But thanks to the Arktoons subscribers, the story will continue, the second book is already being illustrated and the new episodes will appear on the site once they have been colored and lettered. In my opinion, the new art is even better; the image below is from the work-in-progress.

Matt Taibbi tracks the Narrative

Specifically, he observes the way it was applied to try to discredit Tucker Carlson:

On Monday, June 28th, Fox host Tucker Carlson dropped a bomb mid-show, announcing he’d been approached by a “whistleblower” who told him he was being spied on by the NSA.

“The National Security Agency is monitoring our electronic communications,” he said, “and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.”

The reaction was swift, mocking, and ferocious. “Carlson is sounding more and more like InfoWars host and notorious conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones,” chirped CNN media analyst Brian Stelter. Vox ripped Carlson as a “serial fabulist” whose claims were “evidence-free.” The Washington Post quipped that “in a testament to just how far the credibility of Tucker Carlson Tonight has cratered,” even groups like Pen America and the Reporters Committee on the Freedom of the Press were no-commenting the story, while CNN learned from its always-reliable “people familiar with the matter” that even Carlson’s bosses at Fox didn’t believe him.

None of this was surprising. A lot of media people despise Carlson. He may be Exhibit A in the n+2 epithet phenomenon that became standard math in the Trump era, i.e. if you thought he was an “asshole” in 2015 you jumped after Charlottesville straight past racist to white supremacist, and stayed there. He’s spoken of in newsrooms in hushed tones, like a mythical monster. The paranoid rumor that he’s running for president (he’s not) comes almost entirely from a handful of editors and producers who’ve convinced themselves it’s true, half out of anxiety and half subconscious desperation to find a click-generating replacement for Donald Trump.

The NSA story took a turn on the morning of July 7th last week, when Carlson went on Maria Bartiromo’s program. He said that it would shortly come out that the NSA “leaked the contents of my email to journalists,” claiming he knew this because one of them called him for comment. On cue, hours later, a piece came out in Axios, “Scoop: Tucker Carlson sought Putin interview at time of spying claim.”

In a flash, the gloating and non-denial denials that littered early coverage of this story (like the NSA’s meaningless insistence that Carlson was not a “target” of surveillance) dried up. They were instantly replaced by new, more tortured rhetoric, exemplified by an amazingly loathsome interview conducted by former Bush official Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC. The Wallace panel included rodentine former Robert Mueller team member Andrew Weissman, and another of the networks’ seemingly limitless pool of interchangeable ex-FBI stooge-commentators, Frank Figliuzzi.

Weissman denounced Carlson for sowing “distrust” in the intel community, which he said was “so anti-American.” Wallace, who we recall was MSNBC’s idea of a “crossover” voice to attract a younger demographic, agreed that Carlson had contributed to a “growing chorus of distrust in our country’s intelligence agencies.” Figliuzzi said the playbook of Carlson and the GOP was to “erode the public’s trust in their institutions.” Each made an identical point in the same words minus tiny, nervous variations, as if they were all trying to read the same statement off a moving teleprompter.

As I have said, many times, the only way to be certain something didn’t happen is if it is presented as the mainstream narrative. The one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that the media is attempting to deceive you.

They cannot be instructed

Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.
– Aristotle, Rhetoric

Talk about impervious to dialectic! These people watch a man being carted off to the hospital, twitching and trembling from an obvious adverse reaction, and they just stand in line to take their turn. Remember this the next time you’re having difficulty walking someone through a syllogism.