Now It’s Their Turn

The media hasn’t been so much indifferent as sneeringly amused by the complaints of American workers whose jobs have been eliminated by the financial rapine of Wall Street under a false flag of creative destruction. But they aren’t sneering or laughing anymore now that the financial parasites have figured out how to prey upon their industry:

The scene was somehow even grimmer than I’d imagined. Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.

Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and you’ll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. This is the story we’ve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and it’s not without truth. But what’s happening in Chicago is different.

In May, the Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.

Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state’s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who’d helped expose the governor’s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone….

What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.

Hey, it’s just capitalism, right? It’s just capitalists maximizing efficiency, right? Besides, all those journalists can just learn to code, right?

After all, these days, people don’t need newspapers any more than they need buggy whips.

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Never Laugh at God

Because He will have the last laugh. And sometimes, He’ll even have a chuckle or two while you’ve still got time to repent:

Penn Jillette, the tall half of the hugely successful magician duo Penn & Teller, is one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken atheists. For decades, Jillette has smugly condemned all manner of religious, psychic, and pseudoscientific irrationality. He also has a fan base on the right, because as a self-described libertarian, Jillette’s often mused about how “taxation is theft” and government compulsion is bad.

Penn Jillette: a man with no gods, including government. A man who falls for no (to use the title of his Showtime series) “bullshit.”

Then his teenage daughter decided that she’s a man. And the world witnessed how quickly the “smug” vanishes from the rationalist when the bullshit hits too close to home.

About a year or so ago, Jillette’s daughter, Moxie Crimefighter (yes, that’s her name), decided that she’d been “assigned the wrong sex at birth.” And she demanded that her parents no longer use female pronouns for her, like, ever.

Back in 2014, Jillette bragged on his podcast about how he’d raised Moxie to “laugh at God.”

There’s an old saying I just coined: “When you laugh at God, He laughs back and best.” Because now Jillette—Mr. “no pseudoscience,” Mr. “no cults or flimflam”—has become the spokesperson for the biggest pseudoscientific cultlike flimflam of the 21st century. The guy who’s spent a career deconstructing magic (“no, the bouquet of flowers didn’t actually become a rabbit; it was sleight of hand”) is now a true believer that a girl can actually become a boy overnight, by the sheer power of mentalism!

Abracagender!

There’s no such thing as anyone who “believes in science”. That’s nothing but rhetoric from people who need an excuse to justify their disbelief in anything that causes them emotional pain or prevents them from doing what they want to do.

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Be Vigilant

I’m not a priest. I’m not a theologian. I have no secret knowledge of whatever dark and esoteric science was involved in developing the vaxxes. But, for whatever reason, I do possess sufficient spiritual discernment to know that the vaxx is something to be rejected and avoided at literally all costs. And I am very far from alone in this regard.

A well-respected Priest-monk who perform exorcisms, once told me what a demon said to him. The demon said to him, “How are you Christians fearful of death? I have seduced and deceived you into taking the vaccine with the fear of death!” A demon again confesses that the vaccines are his doing. In fact, he says, “We did a ceremony at a Lodge in America for the vaccines.”

See what the demon confesses! The demon continues: “What did you fear? For you (Christians), death does not exist.” For Christians, death does not exist. Do you understand, fellow brothers and sisters, where we’ve come to?

In the Gospels, Christ said something correlating with our present situation. When He entered Jerusalem and the children were calling out, “Hosana! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” The children were proclaiming Jesus as the awaited Messiah. And others who were indignant were saying to Jesus, “Are you hearing what they are saying to you?” Christ responds, “I tell you that if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.”

So correlating with today’s situation, now that the Priest and Archpriest are not proclaiming that death has been conquered, the demons are proclaiming it instead: “How are you Christians fearful of death? And are all running to take this vaccine?”

Which isn’t really a vaccine, but rather a gene therapy/technology, with the aim of oppressing humans. This is the aim, which is why there will be more dosages. In fact, there are many people who say there will be 7 dosages. The demons also state that there will be 7 dosages.

Those who were deceived into taking the first or second dosage, hopefully, will not take the remaining dosages. May they repent, weep and go to confession, because their salvation is in danger. We all ought to be vigilant of this.

And while I am as skeptical as any atheist about those whose demono-calvinism interprets every unfortunate or unpleasant event as being the result of evil intervention in their lives – you know what I mean, the sort of individual who requests an exorcism because “I feel a little blue today” and believes the Lego brick he stepped on the night before was personally placed there by the Prince of Hell – there is a very strong stench of sulfur about literally everything related to both Covid and the vaxxes.

In fact, it would not surprise me in the least if the ritual that is suspected to have taken place at Davos, Switzerland in the second week of October, 2020 marked the official launch of what appears to be a literally infernal campaign.

For the non-believer, there are no shortage of logical, medical, and scientific reasons to reject the vaxxes. The case against them is very far from merely spiritual. But the spiritual aspects that many discerning individuals have detected are a reason for pureblood Christians be particularly vigilant, especially in light of the predictive programming now being broadcast to the public.

What does “be vigilant” mean in this context? It means checking what is in every shot and substance being administered to you or to your children in a medical situation. It means keeping your children out of the public schools. It means talking to your kids who are in college, to make sure they are ready for the social and administrative pressure that will be applied to them. It means accepting, in advance, that you won’t be participating in that public event, taking that vacation, or visiting those family members.

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Kill ‘Em Off Quicker

The UK speeds up the boosting timeframe:

Ministers are ripping up the booking system for Covid booster jabs amid growing fears the faltering vaccination programme risks triggering a winter spike – and another dreaded lockdown.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid has ordered NHS chiefs to allow over-50s to book their third jab a month earlier than at present in a bid to turbocharge the sluggish rollout of boosters to combat Covid.

People are eligible for the booster six months after their second jab. But as it stands, patients cannot even start the booking process until that date, and then must wait an average of 18 days to get their appointment.

The delay is believed to be a key reason why only around 4.5 million out of the 9.3 million eligible people in England have so far received the third dose.

The new plan, which Government sources say will be put into effect as soon as possible, will allow people to book in advance so they can get it as soon as the first day they are eligible.

I wonder what they’re going to do once it becomes sufficiently obvious to all and sundry that it is now the vaccines and boosters that are the vulnerability.

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Shooter’s Choice

Ah, guys, I was joking about that. You know, because of how obviously absurd the idea of mixing-and-matching vaccines is.

The FDA on Wednesday also gave the go-ahead for people to receive a different booster dose from their initial vaccine series. Panel members agreed that, depending on preference and availability, people could pursue the “mix-and-match” strategy. Preliminary results from a recent study found that every combination of mixing and matching COVID-19 booster shots increased immune response without safety concerns. The mix-and-match method appeared to give the biggest boost to J&J recipients who get their second shot from Moderna or Pfizer, though the study hasn’t yet been peer reviewed.

See, even the FDA supports vaxx-maxxing. It’s how the species can evolve more rapidly.

COVID and Climate Change

A three-way conversation between Daniel Sanderson, Steve Keen and me, in which we somehow manage to avoid discussing either COVID or climate change.

DS: That’s a project that we’re releasing in January and I wanted to include in that academy, a course from Steve as well on economics.

VD: That’s going to be intriguing because Steve is not generally what one would consider to be Econ 101 material.

DS: No, it’s not, but we’ve talked a little bit about the show and I think the best thing is to try and summarize what he’s saying and then build off of that. That’s kind of the idea and the course just takes shape.

VD: I can write that for you in five minutes. In 30 seconds, I can summarize everything you need to know about Steve Keen’s work in economics.

DS: Okay here we go! Yeah, here we go.

VD: It’s very simple. Everything you’ve ever read is wrong.

To be clear, I still don’t do interviews. But I absolutely will make the occasional exception on behalf of requests from Castalia and Arkhaven authors, particularly if the Castalia/Arkhaven author happens to be the greatest living economist.

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A Flaming Techwreck

I wouldn’t use Team Kushner’s TRUTH SOCIAL even if it was an excellent, reliable platform simply because I regard it as just another false alternative gatekeeper in the Parler mode. But it’s not even remotely surprising to see that, in the dev sense, they’re already digging themselves into a hole and splashing gasoline all over themselves.

The new social network founded by former President Trump may violate the terms of use of the software on which it is based. On Wednesday night, after Trump revealed the TRUTH social app, Twitter users began to note that the network appeared to be based on an open-source social networking software called Mastodon, which allows people to modify the underlying code so long as they abide by its license. But the Trump network appears to have taken the publicly available code for the website while violating the terms that make it free to use.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko told TPM in an email that TRUTH appeared to violate the terms of use that the software sets forth: making the source code available, and having a copy of the general product license available to users. “I do intend to seek legal counsel on the situation though,” Rochko told TPM, while declining to discuss any specific legal action he may be contemplating. “Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free,” Rochko added.

The AGPL license mandates that software developed for free — like Mastodon — remain publicly available after its been modified. Under the license, TRUTH needs to share any modifications to Mastodon’s code. The requirement allows developers to remain aware of how the software is being used so long as its run on public servers, continuing the chain by which different open-source developers continue to work on and further modify code that’s been created.

And it’s only a matter of time before someone lights a match. People purporting to represent either the Republican or the MAGA establishments have been sniffing around Gab, BitChute, Infogalactic, and Unauthorized for 18 months now, and at no time have they demonstrated even a modicum of serious technical knowledge. It’s quite likely that they have very little idea what they’re doing and I expect they will make all the obvious mistakes that people who have been working on these things for the last five years have either experienced or avoided.

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