World-renowned epidemiologist, Professor Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, has made the point that the biggest source of disinformation during the two plus years of the Covid pandemic was government and its agencies. Around the democratic world, and certainly here in Australia, governments deliberately instilled fear that was in no proportion to the actual risk to anyone under 75…
“Let’s not politicize oil!” How many times have you heard that admonition?
It was first coined in the late 19th century, when oil was beginning to emerge as the key lubricant of a modern industrial society. Having started as a new venture by private entrepreneurs, what took shape as the oil industry soon attracted the attention of all major industrial nations. By the early 20th century most of them had set up their national, that is to say state-owned, oil companies, thus making oil political while insisting that it shouldn’t be politicized. (The US alone didn’t and still doesn’t have a state-owned oil company.) From the start, the biography of oil has included another theme: fear of the world running out of oil. In the 1930s a report prepared for the British admiralty warned that oil may become “a scarce resource” within a couple of decades.
Our modern ruling class is peculiar. One of its many peculiarities is its penchant for fads, and what can only be called mass hysteria. Repeatedly, we see waves in which something that nobody much cared about suddenly comes to dominate ruling class discourse. Almost in synchrony, a wide range of institutions begin to talk about it, and to be preoccupied by it, even as every leading figure virtue-signals regarding this subject which, only a month or two previously, hardly any of them even knew about, much less cared about.
There are several factors behind this, but one of the most important, I think, is that our ruling class is a monoculture.
Batya Ungar-Sargon on how the working classes are being sacrificed to elite virtue-signalling.
The modern left hasn’t just abandoned its former working-class supporters – it has actively turned against them, too. More often than not, in elite leftist circles, ordinary working people are looked down upon with disdain, as having the wrong political views and the wrong cultural tastes. Worse still, many of the left’s preferences are clearly harmful to workers. The green agenda, in particular, shows little regard for the lives and livelihoods of vast swathes of the population. So how did we get here?
The bold release by Elon Musk of Twitter files on how and why employees blocked The Post’s 2020 bombshell on Hunter Biden’s laptop marks a defining moment in modern American history. The disturbing details of arrogance and ignorance revealed the so-called geniuses pulling the technology levers to be as supernatural as the man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz.”
The deflating reaction in both is the same: Is that all there is?
In this case, no, not by a long shot. For Musk’s revelations must be the start of a national campaign to expose the entire picture of the unholy collusion between partisan government censors and Big Tech
Among the zaniest nuggets of news to fall out of the Emergencies Act hearings this week was a text-message exchange in which exasperated federal cabinet ministers discussed mobilizing Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) tanks against last winter’s truck convoy protests centred on Ottawa. On Feb. 2, less than a week after the trucks showed up in the capital, Justice Minister David Lametti urged the public safety minister, Marco Mendicino, to act fast.
Those most responsible for the opioid epidemic are part of America’s most privileged classes
More than two decades into America’s catastrophic opioid epidemic, the demographics of this unprecedented tragedy are clear. By far, the brunt of the harm has been borne by America’s poor and working classes.
Multiple studies show a strong correlation between lack of employment, economic distress and overdose fatalities. Indeed, a 2021 study by the National Academy of Sciences concluded most of the decline in life expectancy beginning in the mid-1990s among working-age men and women was attributable to drug poisonings of people with a high school education or less.
They now seek to control all of society, not just the economy.
The primary fault line in our current political climate is that between a belief system rooted in law and policy championing the primacy of the individual and the various isms seeking societal advancement through collective action. This contest appears in political issues ranging from education to fiscal policy to sociocultural matters.
In more than a decade on Twitter, Walter Kirn watched as the platform manipulated reality in real-time. Now? ‘Let the wild rumpus begin.’
Let me tell you about my strange time on Twitter, a so-called “social-media platform” of the early 21st century. In what I suspect is the increasing likelihood that digital records of our lives now will someday be erased, mislaid, or virtually composted in such a way as to make them irretrievable, the little story I’m about to tell may make little sense to future generations. It takes place during the period when the American establishment sought to control the flow of information in much the same way it once pursued dominion over resources such as land and oil.
This power grab caused a sort of virtual cold war, and I, as a consumer, a producer, and a conduit of information, got caught in it. Here is how the experience felt and how it went and a statement of what I hope will happen next, now that the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk promises a better, freer day.
If you want to see media manipulation at work closer to home read the comments at CBC announcing Trudeau’s plan to flood the nation with 500K of immigrants a year. The majority are not in favour of Justin’s plan to sell us out to his corporate friends. The immigration announcement was timed for release after a story was planted in Canadian media outlets this week pushing the lie that Canadians are overwhelmingly in favour of mass immigration. We are governed by criminals.
We will soon learn even more disgraceful details.
The Igor Danchenko trial, which started this week, has already yielded embarrassing revelations about the “Steele dossier” fiasco. The FBI, it turns out, offered Christopher Steele, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s opposition researcher, $1 million to prove his claims about Trump–Russia collusion. He couldn’t do it. But that didn’t stop the FBI from using his tissue of lies to obtain a search warrant against Carter Page, a hapless Trump campaign volunteer.
“The problem with living under postmodernism,” Dean Hunter Baker commented, “is that everyone is constantly tending the narrative instead of doing something useful.”
It does seem that way, especially if you run in my circles.
But of course, plenty of people are doing something useful. The world is full of those whose diligent and largely unsung work makes the lights stay on, the grocery shelves fill with food, the toilets flush and even the Internet run. They have been ignored, denigrated and even subjected to a species of economic warfare for the last several decades, but suddenly people are starting to notice that they matter.
Multimillionaire Chuck Todd has never lived in the real world and he made it painfully obvious that he’s oblivious to how the economy works during Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press on NBC. During his “data download” segment, Todd promised to explain “why immigrants crossing the border could actually be a solution to our inflation problem.”
Tiff Macklem and Justin Trudeau agree – make the poor bear the weight!
Terence Corcoran: The economic and moral case against sanctions
Canada’s sanctions against Russia are doing more to cripple the West than Russia
Back in April, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke aggressively describing his government’s decision to escalate sanctions against Vladimir Putin and Russia. “Canada remains determined,” he said, “to be there to support Ukraine, to be there to push back on Russia including with crippling sanctions of a scale never before seen against a major economy.” Looking out over the global economic battlefield this week, most of the evidence suggests that Canada’s sanctions against Russia, along with similar actions by other nations, are doing more to cripple the West than Russia.
Once you accept that Western elites are using the Ukraine-Russia conflict as cover for their Great reset green-scam it all makes sense.
They are more willing than I predicted to immiserate their populations
Europe is belatedly grappling with the (entirely foreseeable) consequences of imposing sanctions on Russia. The Nord Stream pipeline has been intermittently closed over the summer, reportedly for “maintenance” (which no one believes). Another closure has just been announced.
As a result, prices are rocketing across the continent, with the ripple effects already being felt by businesses and consumers. “The electricity market is no more a functioning market because there’s one actor — Putin — who’s systematically trying to destroy it”, EU President Ursula von der Leyen said yesterday, as she pledged emergency EU action to mitigate the impact of soaring costs on consumers and businesses.
They live to move in the worlds of affluence and activism
I’m Facebook friends with a woman who has been in Democratic Party politics since we attended high school together. Since then, she’s worked for power politicians, (unsuccessfully) run for office, and played a central role in the public takedown of an elected official. She has a degree from an Ivy League institution, as does her husband, who works in finance. Hers is the quintessential lifestyle of the urban elites.
