News archive

30 Mar 2020

As I watched the Prime Minister order mass house arrest on Monday night, I felt revulsion, anger and grief – as anyone brought up when this was a free and well-governed country would. I also felt terribly alone.

You could not have known, from anything broadcast that night or printed the following day, that anyone was unhappy with these events. But they were.

So, above all things this week, I would like to thank all the kind, perplexed people who have got in touch with me by so many means, to say they share my doubts about the Government’s handling of…

29 Mar 2020

The deep-rooted fear of contagious disease, hardwired into the collective consciousness by historical events such as the ‘Black/Bubonic Plague’ and maintained through popular culture (e.g. the Hollywood movies Outbreak and Contagion), means that people are without question highly susceptible to accepting extreme emergency measures whether or not such measures are rational or justified. The New York Times called for America to be put on a war footing in order to deal with Corona whilst former Army General Stanley McChrystal has been invoking his 9/11 experience in order to prescribe lessons for today’s…

27 Mar 2020

The Bank of Canada has made a second unscheduled cut to its benchmark interest rate, lowering it to 0.25 per cent amid the COVID-19 crisis.

The central bank made the announcement in a news release on Friday morning.

The overnight lending rate is what the bank charges for short-term loans between retail banks, but it impacts the rates that Canadian consumers get from their banks on things like savings accounts and variable rate loans.

27 Mar 2020

Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged said

The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggart estate.  Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree.  It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there.  Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot
26 Mar 2020

What humanity needs to do, but hasn't as of yet, is learn to strike a balance between these two axioms. If done right, we can get pretty close to having our collective cake and eating it too, complete with money hidden in it like days of old. While working hard to ensure the development of a set of products and services that allow those (this would include charitable organizations as well for example) who wish to embark upon the nurturing of those not able to do so for themselves while not forcing others to if they so choose, we must also stop being responsible for the failure and/or lack of foresight of others.

25 Mar 2020

Because testing regimens across the world have varied tremendously, the actual mortality and hospitalization rates of COVID-19 have been hard to pin down. But modeling by researchers at the University of Oxford could provide some welcome good news, even if the initial takeaway doesn’t seem so promising. According to a team from Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease lab, half of the population of the United Kingdom may have already been infected with the coronavirus.

25 Mar 2020

We frequently encounter a problem similar to this with COVID-19 reporting. News stories frequently focus on COVID-19 cases rather than death rates in their reporting. Consider this Reuters headline today: "United States could become coronavirus epicenter: WHO"

The casual readers who skims headlines is likely to take away from this the idea that the United States is following the same trajectory as countries like Spain and Italy when it comes to the COVID-19 outbreak.

25 Mar 2020

The last days and weeks of the coronavirus epidemic give an interesting insight into the human psyche. Elementary liberties are restricted all over the world, such as the freedom of movement or private property. Yet most people accept these restrictions without blinking, as the state declares their indispensability.

25 Mar 2020

Do what what the state says or be cut off. This is the totalitarian message the mayor of Los Angeles delivered. Listen to his delivery style, very measured and calculated, a careful cadence steeped in drama and using emotionally charged words. He even invoked the spectre of the recent fires. This speech is a great example of propaganda. To be sure, he may even believe what he is saying, may really believe he's acting in the best interest but that changes…

24 Mar 2020

For the first time in a long time, the pace of our existence has changed. Many of the circumstances surrounding our recent collective experience are new; very few folks are still with us who would have had even conceptually similar experiences, most have passed on. Further, due to advancements in technology, similar past experiences are not really possible anymore; digital data and information delivery changed the old playing field completely and there is no going…

24 Mar 2020

Many of the major human infectious diseases, including some now confined to humans and absent from animals, are ‘new’ ones that arose only after the origins of agriculture. Where did they come from? Why are they overwhelmingly of Old World origins?

24 Mar 2020

“We showed that even though COVID-19 is caused by a new virus, in an otherwise healthy person, a robust immune response across different cell types was associated with clinical recovery, similar to what we see in influenza,” says study co-author Prof. Katherine Kedzierska.

24 Mar 2020

I’ve been writing about our ongoing crisis for over ten years, so it’s not really a shock to me the shit has finally hit the fan. I certainly didn’t expect a global pandemic to be the catalyst for part two of this Fourth Turning. But, I’m sure most people didn’t see Hitler’s invasion of Poland leading to a world war resulting in 65 million deaths when they were just living their lives in early 1939.

23 Mar 2020

The word ‘pandemic’ bears a similarity to the word ‘panic’ and indeed ‘pandemonium’. In fact ‘pandemic’ evokes an almost instant flush of fear in those easily manipulated by mass media, before any details have even touched the surface or context in which the word is being used.

23 Mar 2020

If I never hear the terms 'social distancing' and 'self isolating' again I will daisy push a happy camper. This desire has nothing to do with wanting life back to normal, that ship has forever sailed, welcome to a whole new show, but rather the ease with which folks are normalizing these ideas and negatively judging, or worse, anyone who does not jump on this bandwagon. The phrases have been made trendy and fashionable, gross. It's also important to note that this type of embrace is only happening because the lights are still on and potable water is still running. Change either of those two dynamics . .

23 Mar 2020

This item is noteworthy due to the amount of deaths among the Asian community in general as well as the concentration of cases and deaths in north Italy where Prato is located.

23 Mar 2020

More than 99% of Italy’s coronavirus fatalities were people who suffered from previous medical conditions, according to a study by the country’s national health authority.

After deaths from the virus reached more than 2,500, with a 150% increase in the past week, health authorities have been combing through data to provide clues to help combat the spread of the disease.

22 Mar 2020

Here's a comment found on a financial forum attached to an article about COVID-19. IMHO, it can stand as a representative example of many of the memes, posts, comments and so on that can be found flowing thru social media and discussion boards. So here we have a pretty technical sounding blurb which reads as if the author has at least a reasonable grasp of the subject matter. It also appears as if it was written elsewhere and cut & pasted in.

22 Mar 2020

This is a collection of stuff that caught my eye and that I want to keep an eye on. For the most part, stuff here has not been fact checked yet most likely due to lack of time. If stuff turns out to be dragon dung, I'll remove it, if not, I'll also remove it but it will be posted elsewhere on the site. Bottom line: this is an unvetted collection bucket of info.

22 Mar 2020

The Jackpot is what Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart have been converging on for years, before anybody ever heard of COVID-19. They said that the current conventional assumption, that the next 20 years would be a somewhat straight-forward linear extrapolation of the previous 20, was wrong. They didn’t know what the catalyst would be, nor did any like-minded commentators such as Charles Hugh Smith,  James Kunstler, John Michael Greer,  or even myself, when I intuited in Unicorn Winter that “Ground Hog Day was…

22 Mar 2020

I don't know anything about Dr Vernon here and I surmise from some of the YouTube comments that he is perceived to have less than a stellar media past, however, those are just usernames on a video platform.

Either way, some interesting points made here and at some point I hope to take him up on his offer of checking out his sources.

22 Mar 2020

Based on many comments, memes and posts I've seen on social media over the last few weeks, one would get the impression that humans have never been exposed to a virus before. My personal most disliked ones are those that outline a potential trail of infection from one person to another usually ending up with the text painting the 'perpetrator' as a bad person while at the same time exposing the virtues of 'self isolation' or 'social distancing'. Ridiculous at best, misinformed fear mongering is more like it.

10 Mar 2020

Caitlin Johnstone - One of the biggest and most consistent challenges of my young career so far has been finding ways to talk about solutions to our predicament in a way that people will truly hear. I talk about these solutions constantly, and some readers definitely get it, but others will see me going on and on about a grassroots revolution against the establishment narrative control machine and then say “Okay, but what do we do?” or “You talk about problems but never offer any…

10 Mar 2020
These two incidents should be of great interest and concern to those who have an ambivalent attitude towards the tracking that goes one with most of the network based technology that is in use today. In the cases of what we would perceive as a simple matter of mistaken identity, we often tend not to take into account the motivation(s) of those operating within the legal system and just figure it will be no problem clearing the issue up, home by lunch as it were.…
10 Mar 2020

"Wikipedia is generally thought of as an open, transparent, and mostly reliable online encyclopedia. Yet upon closer inspection, this turns out not to be the case.

In fact, the English Wikipedia with its 9 billion worldwide page views per month is governed by just 500 active administrators, whose real identity in many cases remains unknown."

09 Mar 2020

Turn on the news and chances are the story concerns the special class. History books are mostly chronicles of the special class—their wars, machinations, depredations, follies, all-too-rare wisdom, monuments to themselves, and the invasions and revolutions that occasionally upend them. It goes far beyond propaganda or brainwashing, it is simply an ingrained fixation, accepted by virtually everyone, that attention must always be on the special class and its…

07 Mar 2020

For those addicted to the everyday Kool-Aid of corporate tabloid media at CNN, Washington Post, NY Times, Yahoo News, etc. you’re in for a big surprise. Last month’s newsletter dealt with the historical context of our newest Boutique Epidemic. This month we’ll cover why this phantasm is being kept alive, in the absence of scientific evidence. And why it’s about to vanish. Don’t have to be much of a fortuneteller to see all the usual signs falling into…

28 Feb 2020

Closer to home, Canada has a host of issues of its own to deal with. The one I'd like to look at this morning is the ongoing pipeline issue with the Wet’suwet’en Nation and the supportive protests and blockades all across the country. Interestingly, this is actually an easy one to solve but because of government action past and present, the problem is much larger than it needs to be.

29 Jul 2019

Twitter today provides us with a little insight into how the political system functions while at the same time showing us how broken the entire concept is.