90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, May 20, 2022

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #419

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #417

Car Vs. Ferrari Vs. Van And The Guy On The Motorcycle Escaped Death By A Hair....

More Fabulous Gifs:

This Is What Happens When You Forget To Secure Your Stripper Pole...

He Ain't Gonna Let You Cross That Street...

Trucks Don't Take Corners So Well.....

Looks Like She Changed Her Mind Too Late...

When You Get WAY Too Carried Away At The Dance Club...

Graphic: Female Suicide Bomber Explodes Bomb Inside Office...

They Could Never Do This Commercial Today!!

Vorpal Rabbit Vs. Headbutt Goat

..And This Little Piggy Went Weee Weee Weee

When The Bottle Hits You!

Lockdowns, Closures, and the Loss of Moral Clarity

Last weekend, an 18-year-old kid slogged a powerful weapon into a Buffalo, New York, grocery store and started shooting people based on race. Thirteen people were slaughtered. His goal was to start a race war, along the lines of the fiction books that inspired his online gurus. He live-streamed the carnage and left a manifesto explaining his motives. His ideology – which has deep roots and has spawned genocides – is the kind of demonic gibberish that unstable kids find on the Internet when they are looking for some mission and meaning in life.

Why might this kid have allowed his brain to become poisoned in this way? He was a high school junior when the schools in his town were closed by government, from March 2020 through September at the earliest. That cut him off from peers and normal social life and the civilizing effect that they have. He lived online in isolated loneliness.

He admits this in his revolting “manifesto.”

“Before I begin I will say that I was not born racist nor grew up to be racist. I simply became racist after I learned the truth. I started browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom, remember this was during the outbreak of covid…. I never even saw this information until I found these sites, since mostly I would get my news from the front page of Reddit. I didn’t care at the time, but as I learned more and more I realized how serious the situation was. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore, I told myself that eventually I was going to kill myself to escape this fate. My race was doomed and there was nothing I could do about it.”

These words reflect grave pathology. Recent surveys of people in forced covid isolation have found that some 30% develop strong symptoms of PTSD over the course of weeks. In this case, an already imbalanced kid found personal meaning through his own perceived “race” identity. He invented a sense of belongingness through an imagined artificial solidarity with others of his tribe. The next steps are obvious: the demonization of others who are blamed for his plight, the manufacturing of a mission, and the valorization of his own violent longings. The grotesque ideology he adopted was the replacement for what he lost or never had.

The disruption of closures and quarantines affected millions of others without the same results but the tendency is there: people are robbed of a moral center and a clarity about life’s meaning. In Freudian terms, the last two years provided every pathway for the id (the primitive instinct) to displace the ego, which consists of social norms, social realities, etiquette, and rules when deciding how to behave.

This displacement can leave nothing but instinct fueled by resentment and hate. Along with this comes the search for the “other” on which to blame all problems. Whether that is the racial identity, political deviants, the covid non-compliant, the unvaccinated, or make up any other category, we see the same dynamic at work: the attempt to stigmatize, exclude, dehumanize, and eventually eliminate.

This kid’s behavior is but a sign, a marker, an extreme example of the loss of moral center. It is also a warning. Millions more have been so affected, as we lost two years, not only of education, but also of socialization opportunities. Networks have been shattered. Expectations that life can be stable and good, and always will be, are gone for many among a whole generation. Even the Surgeon General has commented on the crisis for a generation, without of course identifying the most obvious causes.

What kinds of things unleash this Freudian id that is always just beneath the surface? What breaks the barrier created by sublimation? Isolation. Despair. Deprivation. This is linked to a shattering of social bonds (via “social distancing”) and also material loss. These cause hope to evaporate. A happy future starts to seem unattainable, and so there is a loss of desire to work toward that end. Instead, the psychology of reversion takes place: to behave in a primitive, anomic, and violent way.

Freud is a good guide to this tragic process, but to see the other end of the moral spectrum, we can turn to Adam Smith’s masterwork The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is heavy on the analysis of what it means to feel empathy, and not only to feel it, but to rely on it to the point that our own well-being is connected to the belief that others too are experiencing something like a good life.

What instills this higher sense in our minds? It is the practical experience of depending on others and finding value in their labor, productivity, contribution to community life, and coming to see our own well-being as bound up with the fate of others. This is what the market and socializing encourages: the gradual recognition that others, and indeed all people, are worthy of being treated with dignity and respect.

The universalization of this sense is never complete, but as civilization and prosperity grow, we make progress toward that end. This is what grants us ever better lives. Without it, we can very quickly descend into barbarism in the way The Lord of the Flies describes. This is particularly true in the volatile years of youth, when the search for meaning is active and the mind is malleable in both good and dangerous ways.

Take away community and you take away the thing that instills that Smithian sense of empathy that extends from a conscience trained by socialization. All of this is contingent on a functioning market and social order. Without that, a decline in mental health can lead to violent outbursts and even genocide.

The World Can Be Broken

Like you, I never wanted to live in a society that is devolving ever deeper into moral decay. Along with that is, inevitably, a fall in overall prosperity.

Years ago, I was having lunch with one of the great economists who had dedicated his life to studying economic freedom the world over. He developed the metrics to quantify this progress and ranked countries. I asked him the big question, whether there was ever a chance that in the West we could lose what we take for granted, and find ourselves falling back to ever more primitive ways, eventually losing both freedom and prosperity.

His answer came quickly: there is almost zero chance of that. Markets are too complex, law is mostly good, and humanity has learned the right path. The foundations of civilization are so strong that it would require a mighty effort to break them. People would never stand for it. I was relieved to hear this and went on with my naive ways.

Two years ago, in spring, this confidence in the future was shattered. A friend just now described it to me as a nightmare unfolding in real time, as ruling class elites play willy nilly with sacred rights and...

Visage à trois #249

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

A bombshell study - from the National Institutes of Health and Moderna, no less - should end debate

Unvaccinated people are much more likely to develop broad antibody immunity after Covid infections than people who have received mRNA shots, a new study shows.

The gap remains large whether people had mild, moderate, or severe Covid infections, the study showed - undercutting a crucial argument that vaccine advocates have made to defend the shots.

The research draws on data from Moderna’s 30,000-person clinical trial for its mRNA shots. It may help explain why so many Americans now suffer multiple Covid infections, sometimes within months.

Researchers already knew that many vaccinated people do not gain antibodies to the entire coronavirus after they are infected with Covid.

Unvaccinated people nearly always gain antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein, which covers the virus’s core of RNA, as well as its spike protein, which allows the virus to attack our cells. Vaccinated people often lack those anti-nucleocapsid antibodies and only have spike protein antibodies.

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Vaccine advocates claim the lack of nucleocapsid antibodies may occur because the mRNA shots prime people to fight off the Covid infections more quickly and have lower viral loads. In this view, the narrow immune response is a feature, not a bug - vaccinated people are less seriously infected and so do not need to generate anti-nucleocapsid antibodies.

This study essentially demolishes that theory.

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health and Moderna quietly posted the paper a month ago as a pre-print, but it has received little attention despite its import.

The researchers examined the development of anti-nucleocapsid antibodies in people who had been part of Moderna’s clinical trial and were infected with Covid. As they expected, the scientists found that the vaccinated people were far less likely to develop the anti-nucleocapsid antibodies. Only 40 percent of people who received the shots had antibodies, compared to 93 percent of those who did not.

But they then went a step further. Because the infected people had been in the trial, their viral loads had been precisely measured when they were found to have Covid. So the researchers were able to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated people who had the same amounts of virus in their blood.

Once again, they found that unvaccinated people were far more likely to develop anti-nucleocapsid antibodies than the jabbed. An unvaccinated person with a mild infection had a 71 percent chance of mounting an immune response that included those antibodies. A vaccinated person had about a 15 percent chance.

Only in cases of severe infection and very high viral loads did the difference narrow significantly; in those cases all unvaccinated people and most of the vaccinated had anti-nucleocapsid antibodies.

The chart that should worry the vaccinated: the yellow line shows the odds that an unvaccinated person will develop anti-nucleocapsid antibodies to Sars-Cov-2, stratified by viral load. The blue line shows the same odds for a person who received an mRNA shot.

An unvaccinated person has an almost 60 percent chance of developing antibodies even with an extremely mild infection; a vaccinated person needs almost 100,000 times as much virus in his blood to have the same chance.

The researchers also tried to correlate the development of...

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #416

White Supremacist Shoots Up Korean Hair Salon Injuring Three Korean Women...

White Supremacist Jeremy Smith

Jeremy Smith allegedly told investigators had panic attacks when around Asian people

A man suspected of wounding three Korean women in a Dallas hair salon during a shooting authorities are investigating as a hate crime was arrested Tuesday and is suspected in a recent string of shootings at or near Asian businesses, authorities said.

Jeremy Smith, 37, was booked into the Dallas County jail and is charged with three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He allegedly walked into the Hair World Salon on May 11 and opened fire on the seven people inside with a .22 caliber rifle, Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia told reporters.

Smith got off 13 shots before fleeing into a minivan, he said.

"We believe the shooting was intentional," said Garcia. "The actions and the investigation has revealed to us that this was motivated by hate."

One victim was shot in the foot, another in the lower back and the third in the right forearm, Garcia said. They are expected to recover.

The FBI said it is investigating the shooting as a hate crime. Surveillance video captured Smith's van with specific details and determined it to be a...

Tolstoy famously wrote that all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He might have said the same about unhappy economies — and added that there are all too many signs the US recession now in the works will likely be of the particularly unhappy kind.

Among the reasons to fear a deeper-than-normal recession is that monetary-policy tightening is causing the equity and credit market bubbles to burst. Since the start of the year, not only has the Federal Reserve’s abrupt policy shift wiped out almost 20% of the stock market’s value; it has also wiped out nearly 20% in the bond market’s value and close to 50% in the value of exotic markets like bitcoin.

The combined evaporation of some $12 trillion, or 50% of gross domestic product, in household wealth since the start of the year must be expected to cool consumer demand in time. Households will begin to stress about their reduced 401(k)s, which will make them want to rebuild their savings. According to the Federal Reserve, for every sustained $1 loss in household wealth, consumers tend to reduce their spending by 4 cents.

This means that, although consumer spending has held up well to date, because of their financial-market losses, consumers might soon be expected to reduce spending by as much as 2% of GDP. This is the last thing we need when consumers are already cutting back because of soaring gasoline and food prices and because their wages are being eroded by high inflation.

Another cause for concern is that the Fed’s tightening has led to an abrupt jump in the 30-year mortgage rate from around 3% at the year’s start to 5.5% at present. This has reduced the affordability of housing by 25%. That in turn is already leading to a marked cooling in housing demand.

It is also not helping matters that the shift to a very much tighter monetary policy stance is coinciding with the fading of last year’s massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus. The International Monetary Fund says this will result in an approximate halving in the US government budget deficit from 10% of GDP in 2021 to less than 5% of GDP in 2022. So not only will the economy have to cope with higher interest rates — it will also have to learn to live with very much less government policy support than it had before.

Further clouding the US economic outlook is the much more difficult external environment for US exporters as a result of...