2020 Year in Review (By Dave Collum)

 Superb year end review by  David Collum full of keen perspective and plenty of wit. The downloadable pdf of the full article is available here.

Making sense of the craziest year we’ve yet lived through

Imagine, if you will, a man wakes up from a year-long induced coma—a long hauler of a higher order—to a world gone mad. During his slumber, the President of the United States was impeached for colluding with the Russians using a dossier prepared by his political opponents, themselves colluding with the FBI, intelligence agencies, and the Russians. A pandemic that may have emanated from a Chinese virology laboratory swept the globe killing millions and is still on the loose. A controlled demolition of the global economy forced hundreds of millions into unemployment in a matter of weeks. Metropolitan hotels plummeted to 10% occupancy. The 10% of the global economy corresponding to hospitality and tourism had been smashed on the shoals and was foundering. The Federal Reserve has been buying junk corporate bonds in total desperation. A social movement of monumental proportions swept the US and the world, triggering months of rioting and looting while mayors, frozen in the headlights, were unable to fathom an appropriate response. The rise of neo-Marxism on college campuses and beyond had become palpable. The most contentious election in US history pitted the undeniably polarizing and irascible Donald Trump against the DNC A-Team including a 76-year-old showing early signs of dementia paired with a sassy neo-Marxist grifter with an undetectable moral compass. Many have lost faith in the fairness of the election as challenges hit the courts. Peering through the virus-induced brain fog the man sees CNBC playing on the TV with the scrolling Chiron stating, “S&P up 12% year to date. Nasdaq soars 36%.” The man has entered The Twilight Zone.

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Mindset Shift (Corporate management)

 

Mostly true, but I would go one step further: The two need to be integrated!

so:

Purpose without losing sight of profits.

Network with a minimum of hierarchy.

Empowerment with controls embedded in the system

Experimentation in a well structured (planned) environment

and finally Transparency with respect of privacy.

DATA QUALITY MANAGEMENT (YouTube Video - 5mn)

 

A very good introduction to Data Quality Management. 

More professional and less of general interest but still worth listening to if your work is remotely concerned with data.

We're Being Told South Africa's "Scary" Mutant COVID Is Even More Dangerous Than The UK's "Super COVID"

To summarize this article: Covid is a nasty bug but not the end of the world. 

As for the controls and especially control of information, they are far more dangerous and won't go away anytime soon, if ever.

Unfortunately, it goes one step further.  Over hundreds of millions of years, virus have learned one thing alone: to survive. Which is of course what they do exceedingly well. It is said that there are already multiple variants of Covid. The UK strain is one. The South African strain another one. The vaccine may or may not be effective against these two but eventually a newer more lethal Covid virus will emerge. Just a matter of time. Then we will have a real pandemic, just when people, society and the economy will be exhausted fighting the fictive one...

 

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

A new mutant strain of COVID-19 that has been dubbed “501.V2” has gotten completely out of control in South Africa, and authorities are telling us that it is an even bigger threat than the “Super COVID” that has been causing so much panic in the United Kingdom.  Of course viruses mutate all the time, and so it isn’t a surprise that COVID-19 has been mutating.  But mutations can become a major issue when they fundamentally alter the way that a virus affects humans, and we are being told that “501.V2” is much more transmissible than previous versions of COVID and that even young people are catching it a lot more easily.  That is potentially a huge concern, because up until now young people have not been hit very hard by the COVID pandemic.

The British press is using the word “scary” to describe this new variant, and at this point it has become the overwhelmingly dominant strain in South Africa…

The new mutant, called 501.V2, was announced in Cape Town last Friday and is believed to be a more extreme variant than Britain’s new Covid strain which has plunged millions into miserable Christmas lockdowns.

Cases in South Africa have soared from fewer than 3,000 a day at the start of December to more than 9,500 per day, with the mutant accounting for up to 90 percent of those new infections.

If this same pattern happens elsewhere as this new mutant strain travels around the globe, then “501.V2” could eventually almost entirely replace all of the older versions of COVID.

Authorities are optimistically telling us that the recent vaccines that have been developed will “likely” work against this new variant, but the truth is that they will not know until testing is done.

And if the vaccines don’t work against “501.V2”, we could be back to square one very rapidly.

For now, countries all over the globe are banning flights from South Africa in a desperate attempt to isolate this new version.  The UK, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey and Israel are among the nations that have banned those flights, but so far the United States is not on that list.

So people that are potentially carrying this new version of COVID continue to enter the U.S. on a daily basis.

For the United Kingdom, this flight ban may have come too late because two cases of “501.V2” have already been identified on British soil…

Two cases of a new, “more transmissible” COVID-19 variant linked to South Africa have been identified in the UK, the health secretary has said.

Both cases are contacts of people who travelled from South Africa over the last few weeks, Matt Hancock said at a Downing Street news conference.

If the new vaccines are effective against “501.V2”, authorities believe that they already have the long-term answer to this new variant.

But if those vaccines don’t work, this pandemic could be entering a far more deadly new phase.

And of course we are hearing about more problems with these new vaccines on a daily basis.  Thousands of adverse reactions have already been reported to the CDC, and more reports continue to pour in as more people get the shots.  Here is one example from New York City…

A health care worker in New York City had a serious adverse reaction to a coronavirus vaccine, officials said on Wednesday.

New York City Health Commissioner David Chokshi said during a news conference that the unidentified worker experienced a “significant allergic reaction” to the vaccine. He added that the worker was treated for the reaction, and is in stable condition and recovering.

We should not be surprised that there are major issues with experimental mRNA vaccines that are based on entirely new technology that were rushed into production without proper testing.

And of course there are tens of millions of Americans that will never take any mRNA vaccine that literally “hijacks your cells” under any circumstances.

On the other hand, most of the U.S. population seems to think that these new vaccines will bring this pandemic to an end, but if they don’t work against new mutant versions of the virus that won’t be true at all.

It is so important to take a balanced view of these things.

Unfortunately, when it comes to COVID most people fall into two camps.

The first camp is totally freaked out because they think that COVID is about the worst thing that could ever happen to the United States and they tend to favor extremely draconian measures to prevent the spread of the virus.

But the truth is that the COVID pandemic pales in comparison to other great pandemics throughout human history.  The Black Plague and the Spanish Flu Pandemic each killed at least 50 million people.  As for the COVID pandemic, the global death toll has not reached the 2 million mark even if the official numbers are accurate.  If a pandemic of this nature is freaking people out so much, what is going to happen when a truly killer plague is unleashed in our society?

The second camp either thinks that the pandemic is greatly exaggerated or that the virus doesn’t even exist at all.  Even though hordes of people are catching the virus all around us, many out there continue to deny the reality of this crisis.

I simply do not understand that.  So many people that I know around the country have gotten the virus, and that includes quite a few big names.  For example, the following is an excerpt from an article in which Daisy Luther shares what her experience with COVID was like…

Days 3-5: Over the next three days, chills and fever were almost constant. My joints and muscles hurt. Getting up to go to the bathroom felt like an expedition up a mountain.  I was tired and winded. I had very little appetite and even less of an inclination to cook food so I existed mostly on peanut butter and crackers and leftover soup. I was absolutely exhausted and so cold that I shivered violently when I got out from under my bed piled high with blankets. I had super-weird dreams. My cough worsened, my head hurt, and my throat was still mildly sore.

I drank lots of water and electrolyte beverages. My thirst remained unquenchable regardless of how much I drank. I took vitamins (C, D3) and took Zinc supplements. These are my regular supplements but I doubled that.

Days 6-9: The line to get a test at the local clinic was long and filled with people who were coughing up a lung. There was no way I’d be able to stand in that line for an hour, as sick as I felt. Besides, I figured if I didn’t have Covid, I’d get it standing in the line so I opted not to be tested.

This part made me think of the worst case of the flu I ever had, except intensified by about four times. It was terrible.

I usually let a fever run its course but by Saturday I felt so awful that I gave in and began treating symptoms. My normal temp is in the 96s and my temperature throughout these days stayed between 101-103. I staggered ibuprofen and acetaminophen, and I also used a mild muscle relaxant and my Ventilyn inhaler. The meds didn’t get rid of my fever but reduced the chills to a tolerable level. I slept almost around the clock, waking up for a couple of hours here and there to check on website stuff. Fortunately, I have a wonderful team who kept things running for us. One day blurred into the next and I considered going to the doctor again, but couldn’t muster the energy. I felt like if I just got a little more sleep I’d be okay.

My cough was getting far worse and now my ribs and abdominal muscles hurt. It was a deep painful cough that caused me to clutch my chest every single time inhaled deeply.

So to summarize, yes the COVID pandemic is real, but it is not the end of the world.

More people are going to get sick, and some will suffer intensely, but the vast majority of those that get the virus will survive.

If you want to wear a mask, then wear a mask.

If you don’t want to wear a mask, then don’t wear a mask.

We should be free to make our own choices, and we should also be free to experience the consequences for those choices.

Unfortunately, there are way too many people out there that think that they have the right to censor and control what we say and what we do, and that trend is likely to only get worse as our society continues to spin out of control in the years ahead.

 

Merry Christmas!

 Times of changes are also times of opportunities...

Merry Christmas!

The definition of Herd Immunity according to the WHO. Strait from 1984!

 

The first definition is from Wikipedia. The second is from the WHO.

How is it even possible that doctors at the WHO would write something like this?

Johns Hopkins Newspaper Removes Study Examining COVID Death Rate

This cancelled article confirms what we know and the feedback we get from most countries: No or marginal increase of the death rate overall and nothing significant for older people. 2020 will just end up being an ordinary year...

This does not change the fact that more people than usual have ended up in the emergency wards of local hospitals all over the world but it confirms that beyond a very small sub set of people, for everybody else, Corona is nothing but a bad case of the flu. And that consequently ALL the confinements, lock-downs and other extreme measures, have been over reactions by overwhelmed and incompetent governments. 

unfortunately, the economic impact of all this is very likely to strike the economy like a tsunami in 2021. In this respect, the UK with it's early taste of Brexit may become the canary in the coal mine. Let's see...  

 

Authored by Benjamin Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

Johns Hopkins University’s student newspaper, the News-Letter, reported on a university presentation stating that COVID-19 “had no effect on the percentage of deaths of older people” and that the virus “has also not increased the total number of deaths” in comparison to historical data. However, the paper later removed the article, stating that it had been used to support “dangerous inaccuracies” on social media.

Assistant Director for the university’s Applied Economics program Genevieve Briand critically analyzed the net effect of COVID-19 on deaths in the United States based on historical data. Using information from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Briand identified the percentages of total deaths per age category both before and after the pandemic began.

“Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19,” said the News-Letter’s article.

“Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same.”

Though deaths in categories like respiratory illnesses and heart disease seasonally rise and fall together in the United States, Briand noticed a strange trend.

“Instead of the expected drastic increase across all causes, there was a significant decrease in deaths due to heart disease,” in addition to “all other causes.” Additionally, “the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19.”

“All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,” Briand concluded in her presentation. She told the News-Letter that “a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification.”

The News-Letter removed the article in late November after staff discovered its coverage of the study was "used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.” The paper linked a PDF of the original article with a watermark stating “Retracted by the News-Letter” to a statement explaining the decision.

The News-Letter explained that it made the decision independently and encouraged readers to take the article “in context with the countless other data published by Hopkins, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

The staff of the News-Letter referred Campus Reform to an op-ed written December 3 by the paper’s editorial board, which said that “the article should not have been deleted in the first place.”

“Instead of temporarily removing it from our website, the News-Letter should have immediately retracted and provided a detailed explanation of the inaccuracies in Briand’s research,” explained the editors.

“We did not intend to silence Briand; instead, we sought to put her claims in conversation with findings from Hopkins, the World Health Organization and the CDC.”

Briand told Campus Reform that the News-Letter’s decision to remove the article was its own, and pointed out that she explained "during the presentation where I found and downloaded the data from, so anyone can easily replicate my analysis.”     

PS: So not only people have stopped dying from "other causes", but they don't even bother to catch the flu in 2020! Go figure!

Influenza reported by Public Labs: 

2018- 45,881 

2019- 46,974 

2020- 106 

 Influenza reported by clinical labs: 

2018- 183,483 

2019- 250,494 

2020- 496

The Covidians - The Purpose driven Life

 

 Another insightful article to understand the disease affecting our society. Most likely, the Covidians are here to stay! 

The Purpose Driven Life

Guest Post by The Zman

An underappreciated aspect of human society is that humans in large communities need a set of common beliefs. Large society in this context means anything larger than the Dunbar number. Once you get to that number, law codes and a way to enforce them are a necessity. One tool to do this is a common set of beliefs held by most of the members. This provides a mechanism for those rules to become a habit of mind, a shared reality we would think of as culture.

A simple example of this is a taboo against an activity. Let’s say a poisonous berry grows in a part of the forest. The people may develop a taboo about eating anything or even entering that part of the forest. Perhaps they evolve a legend about one of their gods cursing the place or prohibiting people from entering it. Once enough people believe this, it becomes part of the law code of society and it is enforced by collective action against those who break the taboo about entering that area.

It is a crude example, but we have many such examples in the modern day that are not much different from that crude example. For example, Americans remain convinced that eating fat will anger the health gods. There is no science behind the Standard American Diet, but most Americans accept it as true. They don’t think about it. It is just part of the shared beliefs they grew up with and live within, so they accept it as true. We accept all sorts of behavior and environmental nonsense on faith.

Now, it should be noted that the shared beliefs do not have to be accepted by everyone in a society for them to work. Going back to our sacred bit of the forest example, it is not necessary that everyone accept the myth. It just has to be a critical mass that accept it and is willing to act on it. Unless there is an equally compelling reason to resist the myth and the reason is held by a sufficient number of people, a minority belief will become the majority belief in practice, if not spirit.

It is not too hard to find examples of this form of minoritarianism. American history is riddled with causes that were championed by a minority. The proliferating set of taboos related to the Covid beliefs held by the ruling class are a great example. A tiny number of people, relative to the population, deeply believes in these Covid taboos, so they have launched a crusade against Covid. America looks like a weird Muslim country now, because lots of people joined this new belief.

That is another aspect of shared belief. It appears that another prerequisite for large human society is a sense of shared purpose. The answer to why we are here and what is the purpose of our lives is answered within that shared set of beliefs. “My life has meaning because I am part of this great cause of my people” is a highly efficient way of enforcing group behavior. The best rules are those eagerly enforced by a set of true believers whose purpose in life is to enforce compliance.

Move backward through popular politics in America and you see one holy crusade after another driving the political debate. Today it is driven by Covidians. Before that it was driven by white liberals thinking Obama was Jesus. Before that it was driven by the war on terrorism. When the Baby Boomers had kids in school the crusade was to fix the schools so everyone could be educated. Go back further and we had a war on drugs and, of course, the great crusade against the evils of communism.

American history has been one crusade after another. The great battle between good whites and bad whites exists because it fills that need for a purpose. In the albescence of some external foe, the good whites keep their crusading skills sharp by going to war with the bad whites over some moral cause. This not only gives purpose to their lives, but it also reinforces those shared beliefs about who they are and why they exist. The reaction from the bad whites serves much the same purpose.

If you observe the Covidians for a bit, you see this need for purpose. The HBD community, for example, rushed to be the early adopters of the new faith, sensing it was a way back into the community of the respectable. It was not a conscious decision on their part. They did not vote on their secret e-mail list to become Covidians. It was the result of a shared desire to be rehabilitated and restored to polite society, along with the general sense that their purpose in life is to inform the rulers on the human sciences.

The same can be said for the women volunteering to be the mask police in every community in America. The natural role of women has been so reduced in status that this artificial role of Covidian den mother has become highly appealing. Mothers have been far less emotional about things like mask wearing and social distancing than the army of unattached, childless females. The reason is they have kids to scratch that maternal itch, so being a Covidian den mother has little appeal.

The fact is, human societies need shared beliefs. One aspect of that shared belief is a shared purpose. Most people, certainly not all, need that space labeled “purpose” to be filled by society. This is especially true of childless females. It is also true for males with no male role to play. Stripped of natural sex roles, this need for purpose is filled with causes that give purpose to life. The people wearing masks in their cars are not sheep following orders. They are believers looking for a god.

The Death of Europe by Douglas Murray. (Video)

Watching what is currently going on in Europe and the US from Japan is puzzling. So much self doubt and compromise with principles and ideas that in the end, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are staring at decadence. Douglas Murray eloquently and skillfully makes the point. Not much reconfort for the coming Christmas but then again not facing issues strait on is exactly what it's all about and where the West is losing the plot!

 

US politics: When Deplorables Become Ungovernables

2020, What a year! But we ain't seen nothing yet!

 

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

China, Russia and Iran are the top three existential “threats” to the U.S., according to the National Security Strategy. Three features distinguish the top three. They are all sovereign powers. They are under varying degrees of sanctions. And they are the top three nodes of the 21st century’s most important, evolving geopolitical process: Eurasia integration.

What do the three sovereigns see when they examine the dystopia that took over Exceptionalistan?

They see, once again, three – discombobulated – nodes in conflict:

1. the post-historic Pacific and Atlantic coasts;

2. the South – a sort of expanded Dixieland;

3. and the Midwest – what would be the American heartland.

The hyper-modern Pacific-Atlantic nodes congregate high-tech and finance, profit from Pentagon techno-breakthroughs and benefit from the “America rules the waves” ethos that guarantees the global primacy of the U.S. dollar.

The rest of America is largely considered by the Pacific-Atlantic as just a collection of flyover states: the South – which regards itself as the real, authentic America; and the Midwest, largely disciplined and quite practical-minded, squeezed ideologically between the littoral powerhouses and the South.

Superstructure, though, is key: no matter what happens, whatever the fractures, this remains an Empire, where only a tiny elite, a de facto plutocratic oligarchy, rules.

It would be too schematic, even though essentially correct, to assert that in the presidential election, invisible campaigner Joe Biden represented the Pacific-Atlantic nodes, and Trump represented the whole South.

Assuming the election was not fraudulent – and that remains a big “if” – the Midwest eventually swung based on three issues.

1. Trump, as much as he relied on a sanctions juggernaut, could not bring back manufacturing jobs home.

2.  He could not reduce the military footprint across the Greater Middle East.

3. And, before Covid-19, he could not bring down immigration.

Everything that lies ahead points to the irreconcilable – pitting the absolute majority that voted Dem in the Atlantic-Pacific nodes versus the South and a deeply divided Midwest. As much as Biden-Harris is bound to isolate the South even more, their prospects of “pacifying” the Midwest are less than zero.

Whose ground control?

Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points.

1. A series of rules in mostly swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures, without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud schemes.

2. Biden was de facto coronated by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks before the electoral college vote this past Monday.

3. Every serious, professional audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de facto squashed.

In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.

On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”

Dangers abound.

On the propaganda front, for instance, far right nationalists are absolutely convinced that U.S. media can be brought to heel only by occupying the six main offices of the top conglomerates, plus Facebook, Google and Twitter: then you’d have full control of the U.S. propaganda mill.

Another Deep State source, now retired, adds that:

“the U.S. Army does not want to intervene as their soldiers may not obey orders.

Many of these far right nationalists were officers in the armed forces. They know where the nuclear missiles and bombers are. There are many in sympathy with them as the U.S. falls apart in lockdowns.”

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s dodgy dealings simply will not be made to vanish from public scrutiny. He’s under four different federal investigations. The recent subpoena amounts to a very serious case pointing to a putative crime family. It’s been conveniently forgotten that Joe Biden bragged to the Council on Foreign Relations

that he forced Ukraine’s chief prosecutor Viktor Shokin to be fired exactly when he was investigating corruption by Burisma’s founder.

Of course, a massive army of shills will always invoke another army of omniscient and oh so impartial “fact checkers” to hammer the same message:

“This is Trump’s version. Courts have said clearly all the evidence is baseless.”

District Attorney William Barr is now out of the picture (see his letter of resignation). Barr is a notorious Daddy Bush asset since the old days – and that means classic Deep State. Barr knew about all federal investigations on Hunter Biden dating back to 2018, covering potential money laundering and bribery.

And still, as the Wall Street Journal delightfully put it, he “worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign”.

A devastating report (Dems: a Republican attack report) has shown how the Biden family was connected to a vast financial network with multiple foreign ramifications.

Then there’s Barr not even daring to say there was enough reason for the Department of Justice to engage in a far-reaching investigation into voting fraud, finally putting to rest all “baseless” conspiracy theories.

Move on. Nothing to see here. Even if an evidence pile-up featured, among other instances, ballot stuffing, backdated ballots, statistical improbabilities, electronic machine tampering, software back doors, affidavits from poll workers, not to mention the by now legendary stopping the vote in the dead of night, with subsequent, huge batches of votes miraculously switching from Trump to Biden.

Once again an omniscient army of oh so impartial “fact checkers” will say everything is baseless.

A perverse blowback

A perverse form of blowback is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear, the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of what happens next in Dystopia Central.

Both options are dire.

1. The election stands, even if considered fraudulent by nearly half of U.S. public opinion. To quote that peerless existentialist, The Dude, there’s no rug tying the room together anymore.

2. Was the election to be somehow overturned before January 20, the Deep State would go Shock and Awe to finish the job.

In either case, The Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.

It gets worse. A possible implosion of the union – with internal convulsions leading to a paroxysm of violence – may even be coupled with an external explosion, as in a miscalculated imperial adventure.

For the Three Sovereigns – Russia, China and Iran – as well as the overwhelming majority of the Global South, the conclusion is inescapable: if the current, sorry spectacle is the best Western liberal “democracy” has to offer, it definitely does not need any enemies or “threats”.