Open Thread

I found the collapse subreddit’s weekly observations thread to be useful for early warning signals. It’s a lot of doom scrolling and they have a specific mind set (very much taking the MSM line on Covid and Russia/China/Syria/Iran/etc.), but I saw reports of shortages/ supply chain issues and “the great resignation” several weeks before mainstream reporting.

I think the vaccinations are preventing a lot of the more serious cases while doing little to curb infection. So that’s what’s showing up in the MWRA. Thanksgiving is likely to be a mass infection event, as kids and college students infect their parents and relatives. Just as pretty much everyone had their shots more than 6 months ago. We’ll find out around Christmas how things are going. Apparently the infections are terrible throughout Western Europe, despite very high and later than US vaccinations.

My personal observations of Covid is that most people are wearing masks indoors but ineffective surgical or cloth ones. My parents and in-laws keep insisting that they are careful, but they wear ineffective masks (in-laws despite been gifted a box of 50 N95 masks this summer) or N95s poorly fitted (my parents). My in-laws do indoor dining, as if the act of eating protects them from airborne virus particles. I supposed we’re not that much better, since we go to crowded concerts, albeit with N95 + cloth masks.
I will say the 3M Auras I bought at a NC commenter’s recommendation are by far the best of the 6 kinds of KN95/N95 masks I’ve tried. Comfortable fit, good seal, reasonably easy to breath, and doesn’t fog glasses. If I have to get back to the office next year, I plan to wear these full time when indoors.

The fallout of the atmospheric river event in SW British Columbia and NW Washington state is certainly something for me to keep an eye on. The area was always thought to be risky for the Cascadia Fault and being in the Ring of Fire, but I don’t think anyone before 2021 would have suspected the area to be amongst the first to really fall victim to extreme climate change induced weather events. Now Vancouver is cut off from the rest of Canada by road for possibly many months, and presumable and supplies will have to come through the US or by water. A good chunk of the local food supply has been flooded. Vancouver is an extremely rich city so presumably it will be able to cope, but this should give some interesting clues to how the rich urbanized West will be handling collapse.

Who here has gotten a booster? Raise your hand if you have. I haven’t yet. None of us have yet. Should we?

“I will say the 3M Auras I bought at a NC commenter’s recommendation are by far the best of the 6 kinds of KN95/N95 masks I’ve tried.”

Astrid, do you still have the link for that?
I would love to have something effective that doesn’t fog my glasses.
So far I’m one of those people wearing ineffective cloth masks.

As for 3M Aura N95 masks, you can get them here.

3M Aura N95 Masks

I think Rittenhouse would be a good running mate for McDonald in 2024. There would be no need for the Secret Service. Kyle will have security covered.

Nice to see Golladay could take time off from one of his Klan meetings. Interesting that even a fascist nutcase like him could see that the judge was biased, although he saw that as a positive.

Astrid: ‘I think the vaccinations are preventing a lot of the more serious cases while doing little to curb infection.’

There’s no doubt the vaccines are mitigating fatalities. On the other hand, the way the vaccines have been promoted in the US by TPTB in order to return to business as usual is mendacious and incompetent. It’ll become very obvious by Christmas that with delta — since viral loads are more than a thousand times greater and the vaccines don’t mitigate against that — that vaccinated people are in fact massively spreading the virus. This is already obvious in Western Europe.

The American public’s complete lack of trust in TPTB will then play out politically. I said at the beginning of this that how the US handled COVID would be a slow-motion Chernobyl over the next 3-4 years — i..e it would become internally and globally obvious that the US has essentially become a failed state with nukes, as the USSR did in its time. Later, I wondered whether that metaphor was overly dramatic. Nah; I’ve returned to it. COVID-19 will be a slow-motion Chernobyl for the existing US social order.

Keep wearing the masks.

Yup. Cars are made to be just good enough to require many more purchases in the future. It’s that level of competency I imagine with big pharma’s vaccines. Sure they’ll work, for now. That has to be part of the plan. But with America’s failed state status almost ensured, maybe somebody in China will invent and market something far better which outcompetes.

China, like the US, is just another failing state. The problem with covid is that it jumped species. This gave it a new population to proliferate in. We simply didn’t know how it was going to play out, how it might mutate, and how vaccines would affect it. Fauci and the CDC mostly went with the best case scenarios from pathogens which had not jumped species, were far more easily controlled or less infectious. They did not stress what we didn’t know, or the potential feedbacks from covid reservoirs among the unvaccinated. While what has happened is far from the best case scenario of a sterilizing vaccine, containment, and a quick burn out, the vaccines have sharply reduced deaths in vaccinated, at risk populations. Boosters are a wise follow up. They bring up another aspect of covid that was touched on early in the pandemic but then got lost from view. A novel virus like covid had a significant chance of becoming endemic. With a significant covid reservoir of anti-vaxxers, with sufficient genetic mutation to preclude herd immunity, this is where we are heading for now, an endemic virus.

I don’t think the bungling that has turned covid persistent is the only thing that will kill off citizen trust in the TPTB in the US. Prices across the board are being boosted while CEOs brag about it to investors, even though wages have not gone up. Problems with the supply chains won’t be getting solved either, so that problem will persist and get worse.

In what I think was her last book, Jane Jacobs characterized what we are heading into as a dark age. Apparently dark ages, like mass extinctions, happen more often than we realized. By dark age, she means that knowledge of every kind will be lost. We already know better than to trust our media and we are learning, to our horror, that our public health system has also stopped working. Literacy is an increasingly rare capacity. We are also learning that we no longer know how to manufacture or ship the basic good we need to maintain our lifestyles.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dark+age+ahead+jane+jacobs&i=stripbooks&crid=1ZC3W3N3PRZOQ&sprefix=dark+age+ahead%2Cdigital-text%2C613&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_2_14

Yeah, the Rittenhouse verdict will be a signal to right wing, Proud Boy style vigilantes that they have a free hand to kill anyone left, “anti-police,” “unpatriotic”, etc. The US will continue its descent into failed state status. Li’l Kyle had mommy drive him to a bar during a jail release to share drinks with and make White Supremacy “gangsta” hand-signs with Proud Boys buddies, it is certainly no secret who and what he is. Wisconsin is about 8 miles away from me, & I often pick up the right wing shock jocks and anti-vaxxer Bible Banger fake martyrs (“we’re the new Jews wearing yellow stars!”) when tuning the radio in the morning. Over at National Review, the respectable wink-wink we’re anti-Trump and not full-on Racist website, the commenters are all exultant. “I’m lifting Kyle’s mom up in prayer” and “Its so great to drink librul tears” are the tenor of the comments . . . It can and has happened here. I can certainly boycott any and everything Wisconsin starting today, and will. I’m not sure if my financial resources are adequate to get out of the US, but will research the idea more . . . & as a final dunk for crypto-& full-on fascists, let’s acknowledge that Dodderin’ Uncle Joe’s turning the Dem party over to the likes of Mansion-Enema does mean R. wins in 22 with control of Congress and Trump reinstalled in 2024. I’m not sure this country was ever “a republic”, but no, Ben Franklin, it’s definitely a kleptocratic oligarchy now, with a bunch of hate-filled, knuckle dragging troglodytes to watch out for the masters in their Imperial, Cop or just Vigilante roles.

I have again, recently hear Dr. Peter McCullough say that the boosters are failing. And again, he neither explained any details, nor was even asked any. (Shame on the interviewers).

However, in the most recent installation of thehighwire dot com, it is stated (I believe) that the protection afforded by boosters only last something like 3-4 months, which was sort of my guess, though I had thought 2 months a more probable figure.

===============

I’ve had some vague thoughts about the need to measure something I’d call “functional intelligence”, and try and measure that, objectively, and somehow favor intellectuals that have such an intelligence. This would be some sort of combination of objectivity and practical problem solving. (I don’t remember what the trait was called, but I’ve read that top CEO’s tend not to have high IQ’s, but do score well in a trait that was similar to “common sense”. So, I’d start there to figure out who is likely skilled at solving problems.)

If you listen to Bigtree’s interview of VANDEN BOSSCHE, it’s clear his “mainstream” colleagues are what I would call “functionally stupid”, though their IQ’s are probably similar to Bossche’s. These functional morons have caused great suffering, already, but it’s nothing like what might transpire if they continue on their mad quest of vainly trying to vaccinate our way out of a pandemic, at least with the current crop of vaccines.

Another part of the systemic dysfunction I’m vaguely trying to put my finger on may well be “relatedness” – in particular, the ability to interact with possibly similar, but distinct domains. Bossche mentions teams of vaccinoligist, epidemiologists, evolutioinary biologists, plus one or two other specialties. A functional moron may be a god in their narrow field, but incapable of productively contributing to a multi-disciplinary analysis.

I think citizens should develop such teams in parallel to the “official” ones. I’d most trust engineers to lead such efforts, since they are more practical than scientists.

I’d ban all politicians and political influence.

BTW two elements of a legal definition of self-defense are proportionality and real imminent threat. If like Rittenhouse you go to a protest armed with an assault rifle and have a confrontation with someone there, and they’re unarmed, you shoot them, there is no self-defense because there is no proportionality between you armed and them, unarmed. Secondly, being afraid is not a defense in and of itself. Rittenhouse could only use deadly force if a reasonable person in his situation thought there was an immediate deadly threat. But aside from the police, the only clearly armed person in the area was Rittenhouse. He had zero indication that anyone wanted to shoot him. And being afraid that someone might punch you does not constitute a deadly threat. If Rittenhouse was afraid that someone might get his gun away from him and shoot him, why did he bring the gun in the first place? And if someone did want to shoot Rittenhouse, why wouldn’t they just shoot him. The very fact that anyone confronted Rittenhouse is a clear indication that they did not mean him deadly harm. This is how turned upside down rightwing narratives get, that the one guy who was a clear menace in Kenosha was Rittenhouse. It’s harsh but I hope that the people who defend Rittenhouse get the chance for them and their families to live near someone like him.

As usual, Golladay, you are lying. Rittenhouse was the one who was armed. Paranoid nutcases like you are reduced to the absurd argument that the whole world is one massive set of murder weapons aimed at you and Rittenhouse. Of course, if this were true, it just raises the question why Rittenhouse brought an assault rifle when he was practically drowning in deadly weapons all around him.

What kind of a life is it for you that you waste it going from one stupid lie to the next, learning nothing, understanding nothing?

I left a comment at the Bad Times thread, in case anyone is interested, about how Texans can survive another winter power outage if there is one, and why there might be one.

@Hugh

Rittenhouse’s father, aunt, and grandparents lived in Kenosha, he was born in Kenosha, he worked in Kenosha as a lifeguard. He had friends in Kenosha. It was his hometown.

He did not seek a conflict, he also help several injured rioters as well, which is on camera. He even got pepper sprayed that night and was further injured.

You are arguing against overwhelming evidence that Kyle did not start the fight.

You are also ignoring the fact that the rioters were attacking a minority neighborhood and burning it. Kyle, a Hispanic Minority was defending an Asian Owned Business whose owners are on tape asking him to defend it. Said owners lied on the stand because the Prosecutor suborned perjury.

The facts and the law are with Kyle Rittenhouse.

And you are a racist, fascist, authoritarian.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oNWz6J5-vk&ab_channel=RekietaLaw

At the 2:13 mark, the Jury Forms are read out. The Jury decided on the 17th that Huber and Jump Kick Man were self defense, on the 18th they decided Grosskreutz was self-defense, then on the 19th they decided on Rosenbaum being self-defense and agreed with McGinniss that he was in no danger from Kyle.

Its clear they didn’t believe a word out of the Prosecutor’s mouth and Richards habit of not aggressively objecting and saving them for things that the Judge would send the Jury out on, killed Binger’s credibility with the Jury.

Finally, the newest phrase: Hocus Pocus, its out of focus. It certainly resonated with Cochrane’s: It Makes no sense, it doesn’t fit. If it doesn’t fit, then you must acquit. The Prosecutor ridiculing the phrase in the rebuttal made it stick in the Jurors heads.

Justice prevailed in the case. No amount of screeching changes that.

Thanks for your reply, MP. You’re the only one who could be bothered. Not surprising. If we get the booster, it will more than likely be the Moderna. Three of us had the “One and Done” J&J vaccine. My daughter had the two dose Moderna.

NPR had a segment yesterday morning discussing boosters for all. The reporter said she spoke with many experts off the record and they claim boosters simply aren’t necessary for those under 65 — that the evidence does not support it. The reason the Biden admin is pushing the boosters for all is because they believe, unscientifically, they can bring the numbers down to Spain-like numbers with boosters rather than by ensuring greater than 90% of the population is fully vaccinated like Spain AND COVFEFE-45 precautions like PROPER masking and social distancing remain in effect indefinitely. In otherwords, it’s purely political and not evidence based which has been my suspicion.

It really is incredibly challenging to separate the wheat from the chafe when we operate in a such a hyper-politicized environment where fiction becomes fact. I, like you, don’t do the flu vaccine and certainly don’t subscribe to the notion of designer vaccines. I got my tetanus vaccine last year but I never did get my shingles vaccine even though I had a prescription for it. So, like you, I am not a vaccine zealot and I feel the Biden admin is exploiting folks like me and you in pushing the booster for political purposes.

What does it say about the liberals here who are so outraged by a jury finding Rittenhouse innocent, but have nothing but derision for the fates of Assange, Murray, and Donziger? And I don’t see much from them for the millions who are sent to jail on questionable evidence and reasoning by awful judges and prosecutors, to (often privately run for profit) prisons where rape and violence and torture are considered part of the punishment.

Is it surprising that most liberals here are also loudly and reflectively anti-Russia/China/etc despite very little actual knowledge about those regions and the specifically hold forth on, but still considers the US to be the essential country? So they don’t seem to know or care about US history either.

And have any of those liberals who haunt these comment spaces actually giving money to Ian or showed appreciation or concern for our host? I admit I having skip over some of their comments now, but I’m going to guess no more than one or two based on past history.

Who are Murray and Donziger? I have no idea.

When will Kardashian and all the pop entertainment icons take up Richard Glossip’s cause. Oh, that’s right, Richard was just some poor white slob who deserved his injustice and false conviction. If he had been black and named Julius Jones, he would be a cause célèbre. Same goes for the likes of Astrid and Thomas — where are they in their defense of Richard Glossip. Nowhere to be found. Richard can’t help them in their cause to collapse America and throw it into civil unrest.

Killing Richard Glossip

Under fiction becomes fact, Astrid showed once again there is no subject or thread that she can’t work one of her pro-China anti-US rants into.

Plague, Trump wasn’t on the curve, and Biden has been behind the curve on covid. His pushing boosters is I suspect him trying to be pro-active. I have heard remarkably little about any of the vaccines provoking strong T cell responses to covid, and I associate these with effective long term immunity. This may be why we may be needing boosters for some time. But again I don’t know because I haven’t seen any good discussions of the kind of immune responses we are seeing versus the immune responses we want.

As for what China is spending its carbon emissions on. I know people in Shanghai who are now travelling to Xinjiang and Tibet via rail. Somehow they built this (starting from when they were much poorer than now) and even now, they only have 1/3 the USian carbon footprint. Maybe the construction is shoddy, but I don’t hear about accidents and I’m sure the MSM would happily report on them if they existed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Sino/comments/qw3bnd/by_2035_china_highspeed_railway_network_to_reach/

Meanwhile Biden just opened up millions of acres of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling. After chastising Russia and China for not doing enough.

Speaking of American misrepresentations of facts on the ground in China, check out this one –

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/11/new-york-times-invents-sexual-assault-case-to-blame-china.html#more

I’m disappointed to report that even Krystal and Saagar got this one wrong.

I have a comment above trapped in moderation that goes a little further on my thoughts about China. Basically, a country’s future is about trajectory and demonstrates ability to course correct. I see evidence of that in China and Russia, USA not so much.

To twist the knife a little bit more for PS, I actually haven’t found any real noticeable price increases in my occasional Costco and Trader Joe’s shopping forays and what I buy from D’Artagnan’s and specialist online grocers hasn’t noticeable jumped in price. D’Artagnan’s grass fed beef, with the occasional 30-40% discount, is now about the same price as Choice for the same cuts at Wegmans. Still working from home for the foreseeable future. This is the life of my cohort, where the hardship is limited to being trapped home with their kids (often with a hired nanny during the work day) and limitations for vacation travel (though plenty of them are still traveling). Meanwhile my parent’s networth probably went up 30% in the last 2 years and they’re running out of ways to spend it since they can’t run up $30-50K annual travel tabs like they did previously. It’s probably end in tears for all, but for now life is very good a for a certain splice of the PMC.

Ha! The moderation system doesn’t like me today as a second comment is trapped.

Someofparts – MofA is enthusiastic but their understanding about China is very one dimensional. I recently started reading Palladium’s China articles and find them very deep and perceptive. China is not a monolith and studying its fine grains is interesting.

https://palladiummag.com/2021/11/18/the-second-death-of-jiao-yulu/

Hugh: ‘China takes climate change so seriously that Xi couldn’t be bothered to show up for COP26 in Glasgow’

China’s CCCP have arguably taken climate change more seriously than the West.

It’s just that — being mostly engineers, rather than lawyers and financiers — they’ve come up with a different answer. Because they’ve already begun geoengineering over a territory larger than Alaska and more than one-and-a half times the size of India in the Himalaya mountains.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/03/china-vows-to-boost-weather-modification-capabilities

Mark Pontin,

I’ve read stuff from both sites in the past and they are worthwhile, but doesn’t quite catch me the way that Palladium’s deep dives do. Definitely not the full picture, but interesting glimpses.

t’s a matter of reading for pleasure versus knowledge, I guess. I do read Chinese for pleasure and do not enjoy inelegant web-Chinese, so mostly I read old books by dead men. Well written Chinese is a real pleasure to read, with themes and allusions that traces easily across the centuries and millenias. Poorly written stuff is like scratching chalkboard, insufferable. I hope Harold Bloom would approve, at least.

I have previously referred to The Gray Zone’s debunking of the Uyghur separatist narrative of Chinese oppression. They also have some juicy reporting about the NED links to the racist Hong Kong black shirts.

Many millions of Chinese and Western tourists have been to Xinjiang. The purported genocidal crimes would be impossible to hide if they were there.

Since Hugh has seen these links and never responded to them, I assume it’s something other than ignorance that’s behind his insistence of their existence.

But carry on. I’m out. I hope you and PS at least throw a couple bucks at Ian to help him keep this space open for you to hurl your abuse and uncontrolled mental issues to all the “others”.

https://thegrayzone.com/?s=Uyghurs

Astrid – Thanks for the heads up about the Mike Duncan podcasts. Great podcasts make my morning walks around the park even more pleasurable.

Reading comments here reminds me of picking wild blackberries. There are tasty treasures to be found for anyone who knows how to pick around the thorns and sour green fruit.

Astrid, considering the amount of Chinese propaganda you deposit at this venue, I think it only proper and decent your parents with their stolen wealth and the CPC contribute the $11,500.

My long time take on FDR is that he saved Capitalism in the US. I recently began to think of Xi as turning to a version of FDR. Will see I guess.

Hugh or Astrid? I dunno. I like them both. Maybe I’ll flip a coin. Damn it landed on edge. What the f does that mean?

Comment moderation is expensive and labor intensive. The real crime here is against Ian, who does not deserve to have the caliber of comments he deserves run off by trash. You could never do what Ian does, but any malicious loser can ruin it for everybody else. Scum.

In the Uyghurs. There’s plenty of documentary footageof ETIM violence in Xinjiang and Syria. There’s plenty of footage of family members denouncing their separatist family members for telling lies. There’s plenty of footage of people going to alleged camps and finding ordinary schools and factories. There’s plenty of testimony of graduates of so called concentration camps starting that they’re deradicalization centers used in lieu of imprisonment (where the West would send people who behave similarly) and the attendees could go home on weekends. There’s plenty of evidence online that these separatists want to ethnically cleanse Xinjiang, including non-Uyghur northern Xinjiang, to bring about a Turkic dominated Salafist theocracy that is alien to traditionally Uyghur culture.

Nobody in China deny that additional security measures were put in against Uyghurs in the 2010s in response to an escalation terror campaign, how much is reasonable can be debated, though it should be a debate for the Chinese. But there’s no evidence of this 1 million…no 3 million…Ughyur in concentration camp story. It was all concocted by Adrian Zenz, a self proclaimed China hater with no expertise in the area, using dodgy analysis of Google Maps images and misrepresentation of official Chinese government reports, and through ASPI which is largely funded by the US MIC. There’s a small number of “victims” with ever changing and repeatedly debunked (often with their own words) stories. In other words, there’s no credible evidence there but the MSM and Amnesty International and The Nation and Human Rights Watch cried genocide all the same.

Hugh spent all his energy decrying unsubstantiated and often thoroughly debunked crimes of China and Russia (and Syria, Iran, Venezuela…) while ignoring the fully documented and admitted crimes of the US, and then reaches his conclusion that the US is still the essential country and that he’s sure things will be worse in a world without the US hegemon. It is on this basis that I call him racist, imperialist, and ignorant.

Then note that Hugh doesn’t respond or debunk the other side, he just calls them nasty names and make nasty unsupported insinuations. When that fails, he typically slinks off without further response, only to return with exactly the same nastiness in the next thread. There’s an unmistakeable pattern and the kindest interpretation is very high grade copium and willful ignorance, which I’ve seen IRL amongst my PMC cohort, though Hugh would be an outlier even there.

PS is a nasty nut case, no more. Frankly I’ve really tried to avoid engaging with him (not fully successful, because I’m not that good of a person) because it would probably just set of his problems and issues further. He appears to be under a tremendous amount of economic and possibly familial stress and decide to handle it by blaming the Chinese in general and me in particular.

Presumably most of us have had more time to cruise the internet since COVID hit. So, what’s the wildest thing … in comparison to what we’re conditioned to think and believe … that you would have reflexively dismissed without ever looking into it prior to COVID that you strongly believe today?

I’ll go first: the CIA and possibly the FBI, but most definitely the CIA, was involved in the Manson Family and at least peripherally in the infamous Tate murders.

I’ve read several articles about the book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill, but not the book itself, and everything fell into place for me. I had read Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi in its entirety many years ago and though I don’t remember exactly what it was in the book that bothered me, I do remember there was something towards the end of it that bugged me about his narrative of the situation.

What probably happened IMO is that that the murders were drug related and that the CIA was knee deep in selling drugs, which I imagine they still are today though probably not as much involved on the ground selling it as they were back in the 60s. I believe that they worked with Manson as part of their MK-ULTRA/Operation Chaos in the use of drugs to condition people towards violent behavior. I think that explains the somewhat sophisticated tactics that Manson used on his followers as far giving them acid and then having group love and mind-mood conditioning sessions. By the way, the drugs they gave Tex Watson and company on the night of the Tate murders almost definitely were either straight speed or drugs laced with speed.

What I think what happened was that there were drugs that were delivered to the Tate place around that time and some faction of the CIA, it seems that the CIA was running very loose back in those days, asked Manson to send some of his people over there to murder the occupants and then the CIA faction came back later that night and took the drugs. There were several reports of people coming back to the house that night before the police were called and arrived in the morning. Manson himself said he went there afterwards and maybe he suspected or knew that there were drugs there. Why would he go there after Watson and company told him that they had done their evil deed? Wouldn’t he have been afraid of the cops showing up if it was merely curiosity on his part? There were also some drug related disputes that happened at the Tate house prior to the murders but around that same time according to several sources.

That makes the most sense to me. If the CIA was involved in selling drugs … they were and still are (why do you think heroin usage increased so much in the U.S. immediately after we invaded Afghanistan?) … then they had alliances on the ground with non-state protected drug dealers and the Tate contingent may have stepped on the CIA’s toes unknowingly by having a conflict with one of the CIA’s private business partners. Look at it from a CIA agent’s point of view: what the CIA was directly involved in was probably loosely book-keeped, though I’d imagine there was plenty of opportunity to skim profits, but what they could steal and sell went straight into their own pockets.

Anyway, I would have probably dismissed that notion as crazy before COVID and I had had the time to read about O’Neill’s book. Since Helter Skelter was the only “non-fiction” book that I read about the 60s it had always struck me how many mistakes the cops made back in those days in regards to their paper work and letting people loose on warrants and whatnot based upon how many times Manson and company got out of jail for crimes that you’d think they’d be held in jail for until trial. But now looking at it, it probably wasn’t indicative of the cops’ laxity back in the 60s but instead what probably happened was that the cops let them off because the CIA and/or FBI pressured them to and what cop wants to make a stand against those entities that are much more lawless and powerful than the cops themselves?

I’ve also learned a lot since COVID about all the murders and suspicious deaths of Leftist leaders back in the 60s that the U.S. government openly went after or had the CIA’s and/or the FBI’s fingerprints all over them. The lack of an effective Left in this country and worldwide is not primarily due to a lack of will of the populace, but the treachery and unaccountable power of the U.S. government and particularly the military, CIA, and FBI.

Z

when the comments section devolves to ad homs, it loses all utility as any kind of a discussion forum.

anon y’mouse: ‘when the comments section devolves to ad homs, it loses all utility as any kind of a discussion forum.’

Indeed.

On a practical level, too, if you’re actually _not_ interested in discussion, but merely in enacting belligerent meme wars it’s still useless because you still won’t win or accomplish anything.

There’ll always be somebody being wrong on the internet, morons will still be morons (because Dunning-Kruger), and most human beings have formed what passes for their identities around their belief systems — however stupid — and have a hard time changing their minds about anything.

Of course, for those very reasons y’all will almost certainly continue with the idiocy. But you could surprise us and show that you’re actually capable of learning something.

In O’Neill’s book about Manson he said that Manson’s parole officer was working on an “Amphetamine Research Project” at a clinic that Manson and his family visited when they lived in Haight-Ashbury and then after Manson and company got arrested for the Tate-LaBianca murders all the files from the project went missing.

I’d bet one of the experiment they were working on was creating new infrastructure in their subjects’ brains … expanding their consciousness … with LSD and then conditioning/programming those new channels while their subjects were on LSD and then later attempting to focus and energize them towards their programmed task with the amphetamines.

That’s also pretty much what was done with the Manson people who were involved in the Tate murders. They took LSD together and Manson wove love and death into a tapestry of nullifying nihilism. Then they were given speed to do the murders.

Most of the coverage on MK-ULTRA program emphasizes the LSD experiments, but overlooks the amphetamine experiments they were doing as well.

During the decline of the Haight-Ashbury 60s scene Allen Ginsberg said, “Let’s issue a general declaration to all the underground community, contra speedamos ex cathedra. Speed is antisocial, paranoid making, it’s a drag, bad for your body, bad for your mind, generally speaking, in the long run uncreative and it’s a plague in the whole dope: industry. All the nice gentle dope fiends are getting screwed up by the real horror monster Frankenstein speed freaks who are going around stealing and bad mouthing everybody.”

Z

Bruce,

Believe it or not, I am generally sympathetic to national movements. People should be able to form smaller governing units that allow themselves to maintain their unique identity and not get subsumed by a larger country.

However, I think you need to examine if the separatists are organic and represents the best interests of the people they are speaking for. What I see more and more in Asia and Africa are separatist movement funded by the West to disrupt local power centers that they dislike, where separatists do not represent the aspirations of a majority of their populace.
Outside of China, I am currently thinking of the TPLF in Ethiopia, who are waging a civil war against the popular will of the majority of Ethiopians, under the guise of separatism. Even though they were in power for nearly 30 years and were oppressors rather than oppressed. They are backed by the West under humanitarian grounds because the current Ethiopian government isn’t sufficient pliant for the US and too friendly with China. We seen this script play out in the destruction of Libya and Iraq, and near destruction of Syria. The oppression that comes after the victory of the “freedom” movement is exponentially greater than what existed before, even in the case of Iraq for non-Kurds.

This is what I see with Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The separatists do not represent the will of the majority of people they speak for, and are essentially corrupt stooges of the West to weaken China. They are openly xenophobic and uninterested in improving their society or working towards peaceful independence, they never tried. All they do is terrorize the local population through violence.

Taiwan and Tibet are somewhat different cases, in that I do see more organic separatist mmovements. However, the Tibetan exile government is rampantly corrupt and has afeudalist view for their society that the majority of Tibetans in Tibet do not want.

Taiwan is its own thing. But know thatthe pro-unification candidate nearly won in the last election. That the separatists are intentionally playing up the divisions within Taiwan society between those who traces their roots to before 1949 and those who arrived with the nationalists in 1949, and doing a good bit of whitewashing on Japanese colonialism on the island. Also, the PRC wasnt forcing the issue, they have peaceably allowed taiwan to exist for 70 years, Tsai is inviting in Americans and playing nuclear chicken and escalations a trade way that harms the Taiwanese populace, for electioneering purposes. TWhat I see is the West supporting one side oover there other in Taiwan’s domestic affairs, which is just another form of imperialism and over an area that it has no historical claims oover

As for China’s land diisputes, you do realize that Taiwan had claimed even larger area than China and that the Chinese have resolved the vast majority of its land diisputes peacefully, right? the only sticking points are islands in the south China Sea, which is important to come to keep its sea lanes open, and border with India, which is due to India wanting to control Tibet the way that it controls Bhutan and Nepal. There are more than one regional hegemon at play here, and India is backing the separatists even while they keep Bhutan tightly under their leash.

These are my views and I’m certainly open to evolving them.. I would say that up until the last 5 years, when I’ve started to realize the extent of US imperialism, I would be sympathetic to all 4 separatist movements and especially the Tibetan one. But now that I see how they are funded and supported by the US government and looked more closely to what they are actually espousing, I cannot in good conscience support and if them. Not because I support China, but because the movements themselves are very bad for the people they claim to speak for.sgni

-So, the CIA was probably not only running individual experiments to see if they could program people to take certain actions, almost certainly assassinations, but also social experiments and what better place than Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love in the 60s where large groups of people were apparently getting along fairly fine sharing weed and dropping acid? The CIA probably started selling, and giving out for free, high dosage speed to breed disunity and it looks like it worked to some extent.

-This is anecdotal and I never requested confirmation, and was blind to it at first, but when I worked a midnight shift job, which you’d imagine there had an over-representation of amphetamine users, it seemed that libertarianism seemed to also be over represented. And when you think about it, it makes some practical sense that that would be the case. Libertarianism’s heroine, Ayn Rand, was a speed demon and it’s an ideology that is ultimately intellectually shallow and selfish which you either grow out of due to your life experiences or in some ways don’t grow at all.

Speed makes people mentally process quicker and I’d imagine that comes at the cost of intellectual depth and also leads to selfishness because the factor that one is always taking into account, and often the initial and greatest factor, is one’s personal stake in a decision and if one is speeding up process times it would make some sense that one’s decisions would therefore be more heavily weighted towards one’s self-interest.

I’d also imagine that a factor in people’s behavior on the drug is also tied to dosage as well and not everyone turns into a selfish bastard on it.

-Note, how secretive that MK-Ultra was. It ran from 1953 to 1973 and the public wasn’t made aware of it until 1975 when it came up in the Church Committee.

-On a side note, I’m not as down on Reagan as many people on this site are. Too many liberals use the inflection point of weakening labor power and corporate profits that happened during the Reagan administration and blame everything that happened afterwards on him as if the presidents that followed him lacked free will and were somehow hypnotized by Reagan to carry on his economic policies. This is often used in particular to make excuses for Clinton’s economic policies. As I’ve noted before, Clinton was elected largely to veer away from twelve years of Reaganism and what we got instead was Robber Rubin-ism: Reagan’s industrial policy and anti-union zealotry plus a criminally unaccountable Wall Street-dominated financial system.

I hardly ever read about one of Reagan’s most damaging legacies though: he gave the CIA and FBI back their power and then some after a brief retrench in it from the Church Commission and Watergate. That IMO is an enduring and shameful legacy of Reagan because once the CIA and FBI reestablished their power, and probably used it to spy on politicians, it became very difficult to diminish that power. We’re still paying for that today.

Central and South America in particular paid heavily during the Reagan era for the growth of the CIA’s unaccountable power.

Z