James Howard Kunstler

You have been boldly lied-to by them with absolute consistency for years now...

There was Scott Pelley of CBS’s 60-Minutes show on Sunday night — the prime-time slot of the new week — all cued up to run interference for the US State Department (and other Deep State “actors”) in the propaganda war over Ukraine. Let’s be brutally frank and get this out of the way: can you really trust either the US news media or the US government to tell you the truth?

Of course, you can’t. You have been boldly lied-to by them with absolute consistency for years now. Common knowledge, which is common sense’s twin sister, has it that the CIA “owns” The Washington Post, the FBI owns The New York Times, and the State Department owns CBS-News. All are conduits for official narratives. And since the State Department is most of all responsible for the Russian clean-up operation now underway in Ukraine, you can bet that CBS-News is in on the info-grift to protect State, its patron.

What Russia had to clean-up was the long-building after-effects of now Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s 2014 engineered Maidan coup against the elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych. The issue of that bygone day was a tug-of-war between the US and Russia, with Ukraine as the flag in the middle of the rope. Russia wanted Ukraine in the orbit of its economic “customs union” and the US was affecting to pull Ukraine into the Eurozone and NATO — or, at least, use Ukraine as a forward base for NATO, in order to antagonize Russia.

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Linh Dinh

Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot to watch the
bombardment of Gaza. (Credit: The New York Times, Burton/Getty)

My last piece only got five likes after 41 hours. Perhaps because it was a bit disjointed, or maybe Armando’s preoccupation with dick size turned people off. I did rush to get it out. Though impatience is usually a flaw, it’s also a spur to get things done. In any case, I’ll definitely ramble in this article. I have a few odds and ends to address before I get on that plane for Saigon, with layovers in Joburg and Dubai.

Speaking of “likes,” YouTube disabled its “dislikes” during Covid, since way too many people disliked the official narrative, whenever it showed up. Though we no longer know the ratio of “likes” to “dislikes” with each video, the “dislike” button is still there. YouTube has long been a joke.

Like FaceBook and Twitter, YouTube openly censors. Its CEO, Susan Wojcicki, is Jewish, as is Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook, of course. Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, is an Indian who only arrived in the US in 2005. That’s one heck of a rise.

Yesterday, I found out all episodes of On Contact, a Russia Today show hosted by Chris Hedges, have been scrubbed from YouTube. Speaking about the American underclass, I was featured on March 12th, 2017. Hedges:

💬 “I received no inquiry or notice from YouTube. I vanished. In totalitarian systems you exist, then you don’t. I suppose this was done in the name of censoring Russian propaganda, although I have a hard time seeing how a detailed discussion of “Ulysses” or the biographies of Susan Sontag and J. Robert Oppenheimer had any connection in the eyes of the most obtuse censors in Silicon Valley with Vladimir Putin. Indeed, there is not one show that dealt with Russia.”

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eugyppius
eugyppius: a plague chronicle

During the vaccine roll-out, a curious thing happened to establishment messaging. What had been a unified front demanding the harshest non-pharmaceutical interventions politicians would tolerate, devolved into two factions. Some figures, particularly those adjacent to Zero-Covid, began entertaining a mild degree of vaccine scepticism, and claiming that an indefinite regime of lockdowns and masking remained the best way forward. The vaccinators, meanwhile, insisted the vaccines represented our only path back to ordinary life and our prior freedoms. In those early months, if you started noticing that all was not well with the vaccination campaign, you ended up drawing fire from people who said you were just playing into the hands of the lockdowners.

Now, Team Lockdown has been totally routed, and Team Vaccine remains ascendant, but this essential dynamic is still worth pondering. It arises from accepting a deeper, unexamined premise, namely that Corona is a problem to solve.

One of the most important things we can do, to keep the vaccinators and the lockdowners and all the rest of these turbulent malevolent lunatics at bay, is to undermine this premise wherever possible. This is why I like to insist, periodically, that SARS-2 just isn’t that special.

I know some of you have had a hard time with Corona; I was pretty sick myself. I know now few people have suffered lasting injuries. I’m not proposing to deny the truth or to downplay clear risks, but I am arguing that we must insist that Corona is a seasonal respiratory virus that behaves like a lot of other seasonal respiratory viruses. We must avoid giving in to the past two years of risk amplification and decontextualised studies, that present negative Corona outcomes in isolation from the risks posed by many other pathogens. If there is Long Covid, there is also Long Influenza; mutations and variant strains are common throughout the world of viruses; SARS-2 is no more deadly than past pandemic flus; the common-cold coronavirus NL63 also uses the ACE2 receptor.

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