Category Archives: Psychology

What I learned on my trip to the Ohio Statehouse, by Steve Kirsch

It’s mostly anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but are you prepared to argue that government propaganda and statistics are more trustworthy? From Steve Kirsch at stevekirsch.substack.com:

I am on the plane back from my trip to the Ohio Statehouse event put on by Children’s Health Defense. A lot of my followers were there in force. Here is a quick summary of things I learned from the audience and from the other speakers:

  1. A third are still mask brainwashed. Informal counting people boarding the plane suggests about 2/3 of travelers have no mask; 1/3 are still brainwashed. This is consistent with the mass formation estimate that a third of people are lost causes, a third are persuadable, and a third were never fooled.
  2. Vaccine adverse events can happen many years later. Vaccines can kill people many years later. One father lost his 20 year old daughter to a seizure caused by a meningitis vaccine given to her when she was a small child. Vaccines can seriously injure people even 13 years after vaccination. One of the hosts of the event had a seizure during the event. She had the Gardasil vaccine many years ago, but didn’t have her first seizure until 13 years ago. The seizures happen when she is under stress and can be triggered by a bad food choice. So even though she had no adverse reactions for 13 years, now she can be disabled in minutes. This was stunning seeing this first hand and learning about the 13 year latency period.

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The Contrarian Curse, by Charles Hugh Smith

A true blue contrarian changes his opinion as soon as a majority of people adopt it. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

What if all the new consensus memes are as wrong as the ones they replaced?

I have the Contrarian Curse, and I have it bad. The Contrarian Curse is: as soon as the herd adopts your previously contrarian view, you start questioning the new consensus, just as you questioned the previous consensus.

Example #1: fiat currencies are doomed. After all, if creating “money” out of thin air solves all our problems, why not just let everyone print as much as they want at home? Oh, wait, only the super-wealthy and powerful get the newly created “money”? Oh, that makes it really sustainable, doesn’t it?

Now the hot meme is the US dollar is expiring and gold / commodity-backed currencies will replace it atop the heap. Many of us on the fringes have pondered alternatives to fiat currency, and so this becoming mainstream is a real sea change.

Which immediately arouses my contrarian curse. Ok, so exactly how does a gold/commodity-backed currency work? If gold or wheat declines (as measured in purchasing power to everything else), does the quantity of currency shrink to reflect this decline in value? Can the currency supply only expand if gold/commodities rise in relative value? Can the issuing central bank just keep emitting new currency without expanding the reserves of gold/commodities?

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The Tall Ship And The Substitute Teacher, Part 2, by Ray Jason

A sea gypsy acquaints his charges with some disturbing facts of life. From Ray Jason at theseagypsyphilosopher.blogspot.com:

NIGHT ON THE OCEAN

In Part 1, I met the Captain of a Tall Ship who had lost his onboard teacher for a couple of weeks due to Covid quarantine. Coincidentally, he was a fan of my unconventional Blog, and we agreed that I would be his substitute teacher for a while. This is my second lecture to the kids, who are about 16 years old.

Good morning students and shipmates. I deliberately used the term “shipmates” because even though I am not an actual crew-member on the HENRY DAVID THOREAU, I am “one of you.”

That’s because we share an extraordinary bond. We have all savored the Big Ocean – or what I like to call the Wide Waters. When you are alone on a night watch, I suspect that you have been dazzled by how vast and gorgeous the Sea is. And perhaps you were also a bit frightened by how uncaring it is.

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Multipolar Chaos, by Robert Gore

chaos-engineering

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The Russian Central Bank recently announced that until the end of June, it stands ready to buy gold for rubles at the exchange rate of 5000 rubles per gram of gold. The move has been hailed as revolutionary, heralding a regime change from fiat currencies. If only that were true.

It would be revolutionary if the Russian Central Bank made a two-way market in rubles and gold. Sellers of gold to the central bank will get back rubles, but no one can exchange rubles for gold. The ruble will still be a fiat currency. A central bank or government that sold gold for its own currency at a fixed rate would be returning to the gold-exchange standard, which prevailed in many nations during much of the 1800s and early 1900s. Right now, such a move would be so revolutionary it would upend the global financial order.

A reminder: Government and Central Bank-Led Revolutions is a book whose thickness is measured in nanometers. Traditionally, revolutions are directed against them. Under a gold-exchange standard, you don’t need a central bank, which is why monetary bureaucrats hate it. You need a gold repository and someone to print the gold-backed currency. Politicians hate it because they can’t spend currency they and their central-bank flunkies have wished into existence. If they had to spend real money—gold or silver—it would be bye-bye welfare and warfare states, and they would be the inconsequential hacks they’re supposed to be.

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Since the end of the gold-exchange standard, during the reign of central banks and bankers, we’ve had two world wars (and the third may have begun), a massive transfer of resources from the productive to the unproductive, and a proliferation of government promises that will never be kept. Cheap credit has promoted private indebtedness, kept zombies companies alive, blown up asset bubbles, and diverted economic activity from production to finance.

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Great Acquiescence — Glory to Ukraine

It’s beyond comprehension in this neck of the woods, but many Americans accept and actually relish their government’s propaganda and depredations. Who knows what it’s going to take for this love affair to end. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

Americans don’t merely acquiesce to the imperium’s wars, interventions, collective punishments and assorted other deprivations. They actively embrace them.

Pro-Ukraine demonstration in Washington, Feb. 25. (John Brighenti, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The other day I ventured forth from my remote village to a lively market town called Great Barrington to shop for Easter lunch — spring lamb, a decent bottle of Bourgogne. Easter is much marked in my household, one of the few feasts we allow ourselves, and it is a reminder this year of a truth that could scarcely be more pertinent to our shared circumstances: After all our small and large crucifixions, there is new life to come.

Great Barrington lies in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, a fashionable little burg dense — as you can tell simply by walking around in it —with righteous liberals. No place, you remind yourself, is perfect.

And there along the streets and avenues as I arrived were what I had anticipated: Ukrainian flags hanging off front porches, in shop windows, on flagpoles just below the Stars and Stripes. Somebody has painted the bit of board displaying their house number in the blue and yellow we all now recognize. Father, forgive them, I thought, for they know not what blood-soaked horrors and hate-filled killers they enthusiastically endorse.

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The Total War to Cancel Russia, by Pepe Escobar

Official U.S. and Official Europe are promoting and indulging in mindless hate towards Russia. Mindless anything gets you in trouble, and this type of foaming-at-the-mouth viciousness most certainly will. From Pepe Escobar at strategic-culture.org:

By now it’s abundantly clear that the neo-Orwellian “Two Minute Hate” Russophobic campaign launched by the Empire of Lies after the start of Operation Z is actually “24/7 Hate”.

Vast swathes of NATOstan have been corralled into behaving like a Russophobic lynch mob. No dissent is tolerated. The full psyops has de facto upgraded the Empire of Lies to the status of Empire of Hate in a Total War – hybrid and otherwise – to cancel Russia.

Hate, after all, packs way more punch than mere lies, which are now veering into abject ridiculousness, as in U.S. “intelligence” resorting to – what else – lies to fight the info war against Russia.

If the propaganda overdrive has been lethally effective amidst the zombified Western masses – call it a “win” in the P.R. war – in the front where it really matters, inside Russia, it’s a major fail.

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The Teen Girls Aren’t Going to Forget, by Suzy Weiss

The horribly inept response to Covid-19 messed with teenagers’ heads in lasting, tragic ways. From Suzy Weiss at bariweiss.substack.com:

‘It’s like a sci-fi show where people went to sleep and woke up two years later.’ Lockdown is over, but the scars of isolation aren’t going away.

Cheerleaders at high school football game, Melrose, Massachusetts, 1969. (Photo by Spencer Grant/Getty Images)

Lily May Holland, 16, remembers the long, lonely days during lockdown when her parents, both doctors, were at work. She’d watch “Gilmore Girls” and “Gossip Girl” and “Grey’s Anatomy” over and over. She stopped eating and started doing Chloe Ting workouts. “I’d have gum and a smoothie all day,” she said. They lived in the sticks north of Charlottesville, Virginia, on a dirt road between farms and trailer parks and the occasional Baptist church, and she didn’t have a license, so she couldn’t go anywhere or meet any friends. Teachers would post assignments online, but it was like—who cared? Everything happened in isolation, like they were atoms. “I would’ve gone to parties, and me and my friends were planning to go to concerts, and homecoming,” Lily said. “I had crushes freshman year. But all that fell away.”

Teenagers need a social life. Every single study and report and piece of data tells us so. But we don’t need studies to tell us what we all already know. Ask yourself: What would it have been like if you had spent your thirteenth year in solitude?

It was more than a year, actually. Millions of American kids had gone a year-and-a-half mostly alone. And every single girl I spoke to said the same thing about the experience: They felt like they were sinking, or being swallowed up.

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The Nihilism of the Left, by Victor Davis Hanson

The left is certainly nihilistic . . . and homicidal. From Victor Davis Hanson at amgreatness.com:

In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it

The last 14 months have offered one of the rare occasions in recent American history when the hard Left has operated all the levers of federal government. The presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the permanent bureaucratic state are all in progressive hands. And the result is a disaster that is uniting Americans in their revulsion of elitists whose crazy ideas are tearing apart the fabric of the country.

For understandable reasons, socialists and leftists are usually kept out of the inner circles of the Democratic Party, and especially kept away from control of the country. A now resuscitated Bernie Sanders for most of his political career was an inert outlier. The brief flirtations with old-style hardcore liberals such as George McGovern in 1972 and Mike Dukakis in 1988 imploded the Democratic Party. Their crash-and-burn campaigns were followed by corrective nominees who actually won the presidency: Southern governors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Such was the nation’s innate distrust of the Left, and in particular the East Coast elite liberal. For nearly half a century between the elections of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, it was assumed that no Democratic presidential candidate could win the popular vote unless he had a reassuring Southern accent.

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What Is a Miracle? By Dr. Naomi Wolfe

This is a beautiful, moving story. From Dr. Naomi Wolfe at lewrockwell.com:

Mushroom, our beloved and unbelievably elderly dog, finally passed away. There was a day when he simply pulled his snout back sharply at the offer of food, and from then on, his decline was rapid.

There was a day when I would come into the house and find him slouched like a little black and white parcel in unusual places such as the corners of the dining room, or else I’d see him oddly trying to stand behind the wood stove. There were days during which he lay in his bed, curled in a furry round circle as usual, but scarcely moving; the concern, practically the breath, of angels, was palpably over him.

Brian, my husband, made broths, and tried to feed him with a spoon. At last the spoon was refused, and we knew we did not have long with him.

We called two vets; both were compassionate, but brisk, and quick to suggest euthanasia. “There’s a vet service that comes to your house, very sensitively, to put your dog to sleep,” explained one veterinary assistant. “This woman is great — you will love her.”

“I don’t think I’ll love anyone who is coming over to euthanize my dog,” I blurted out.

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And yet, there’s still plenty of good news. By Simon Black

You can always find something to pop Panglossian bubbles, and conversely, there’s always something to counter unremitting gloom. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

On January 2, 1710, King Louis XIV of France was finally ready for peace.

After nearly seven decades on the throne (which still makes him the longest reigning sovereign monarch in human history), Louis XIV had seen more wars than he could probably remember.

Most recently, France had been fighting the War of Spanish Succession against virtually all of Europe. It had been incredibly costly — France alone suffered half a million casualties, plus the war had ruined the economy.

Louis finally capitulated in 1710 and sent a clear message to his adversaries that he was ready to make a deal. It took three years of negotiations, but finally, in 1713, the peace treaties were signed.

The end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713 capped off roughly a century of raging warfare in Europe which had started with the Thirty Years War in 1618.

Along the way there were dozens of separate wars that took place in Europe — Portugal against the Netherlands, the Netherlands against England, England against Spain, Spain against France, France against the Holy Roman Empire, the Empire against Sweden, Sweden against Russia.

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