They didn't build the correct counter-narrative to the myths bought by R&D. The explanatory force of the Double Government hypothesis is undeniable.

...valuing the market at 51X LTM earnings during the present parlous moment in time – or even nearly 27X if you want to give the financial engineering jockeys in the C-suites a hall pass for $77 billion of mistakes and losses this quarter alone–is nothing short of nuts.

Sure, let's buy companies that will take 51 years to actually earn enough to reasonably profit from our investment. This isn't just betting on share price, no...

This is why everyone says long/short like they are options traders nowadays. It's just gambling, not investment.

...posing and posturing have become a mass phenomenon, the tattooing of our time. Of nothing is this more true than contemporary Woke morality. Whereas not long ago young people of the middle classes sought to express their sympathy for the lower and supposedly oppressed orders by imitating their tattoos and way of dress, imitation being the highest form of empathy available to egotists, they now express the same desire by making Wokeness the touchstone of their morality. They think they are rebelling when, of course, they are conforming. They do not realize that it is more difficult, and more courageous, to contradict a friend than to criticize a society.

Can confirm 100%. That said it's essentially impossible to "live in a society" completely eaten by this stuff without "making the trend your friend".

While I find most of this social media stuff to be ridiculous nonsense you can make it work for you if you realize it's just there to build your brand rather than anything genuine. That's all Woke, Inc. thinks they are doing -- but brand building is all about reliably demonstrating higher value, not helping people identify with you. Customers want to be more than they are, and do not want to identify with something on their level. They chase "better".

Bingo, it's all about planting your sucker as close to the money spigots as possible. Once that no longer has any value the cities have to shrink back to the level they can actually work. I think that ironically it's the most dispersed cities like those in Texas that will do the best.

Interesting that CHS also put out an article on shrugging; I personally know a few people who have done so recently. This is the biggest sign to me that the current crisis is actually more serious than it seems.

Lots of great brain droppings here:

Ten percent of my social media notifications every day for the last four years:

“Caitlin I’ve noticed you have opinions about the most powerful and influential government on planet earth. As an American, I find this strange and suspicious.”

As the whitebox for Walmart. Fitting, since they were little more than high quality whiteboxes in the past.

Scott figures out why anyone who excels gets pushed into entrepreneurship and the hustle economy.

Oh my god, this is better than some youtube poops. If this is the competition from the majors, no wonder it's easy money online.

After getting better. We're now entering the hangover of the mania spurred by the end of lockdown 1, as we settle into the permanence of lockdown 2.

It's been well known that if you seriously oppose the wishes of the killer bureaucracies you end up dead, president or no.

This is why I never believed these twerps; I have a longer than 3 second memory.

At the end of the day it's always about freedom.

Michael Malice mentioned a good post he made on secession 4 years ago to dunk on David French.

This brings to mind an important point which occurred to me over the last few years. If I can live my life with essentially no contact of any meaningful kind with people living in the same city I live in, what business of mine is it that they:

• Get Fair Trials
• Don't live in squalor
• Live in Peace
• Share my cultural or ideological or religious values

This might seem heartless for people not but 10 miles away (I live in a big city), but if I never ever meet them (and statistically, I won't)... How are they different to my life from people in say, Congo who most certainly don't have any of said things. Should I want the bureaucratic systems which have the power of life and death over me to have anything to do with them? Or would a more sane social order to have an arms-length relationship with them as is common of international relations?

The answer should be self evident. Cities like I live in are simply too large to even pretend anyone has (or should have!) a say in the systems which have power over such huge masses. The same is true of the state it resides in and the nation said state is subordinated to. No amount of voting can change the fact that the dilution of stake disenfranchises as effectivelly as any other type of tyranny.

The only meaningful solution in the end is fragmentation to the point that people have something remotely resembling a meaningful stake in the outcome of politics. Even a 1/250,000 stake such as in the case of most large cities is so small as to guarantee some other means of influence must become dominant for the outcome to be anything but cacophony. In practice this means "political parties", which in reality is just centralization; pledging your votes by proxy to people who you do not know and will never meet. This is little different from having a king, nobility or warlords, aside from it actually being made less effective due to "design by committe".

This insight makes one realize the only meaningful question in politics is one of organization; are we to be:

• Centralized - Top-Down: This is what the monarchies of the west spent generations making happen, until they caught the virus of "democracy" from the french.
• Decentralized - Multipolar: This is what resisted the monarchs, but was smashed. It was this network of small polities, the church and the nobility that kept the monster of total war chained for a long time.
• Distributed - Bottom-Up: This is the actual "Liberal" program; e.g. Subsidiarity. Only the Swiss are even close to this.

So where does secession fit in?

All it does is de-centralize which paints a big fat target on your back to get thumped on by Big Daddy Centralizer. It is more effective to simply sieze local control over enough things the state cares little about influencing until it's too late. This is probably why Agorism has turned out to be the most effective strategy. Just start doing what accomplishes your goals by hook or by crook. The laws, formal relationships and all that are all nonsense anyways. This is actually how the church in the early days actually achieved the influence (and international freedom!) it had.

Enjoy the decline. It is in crisis that the major institutions actually fail to grasp opportunity. Which is where "the meek" (better translation: those who kept their powder dry) finally get their chance at the brass ring.

Apparently you can leverage vaporware and break delivery promises all the way to being the most valuable automaker on the planet, so why not?

“We knew that the Mitkus et al. paper modeling aluminum clearance had to be inaccurate since it was assuming that injected aluminum kinetics were the same as the kinetics of aluminum acquired through diet. Now, in addition, we see that they did their modeling based on using the incorrect level of aluminum absorption. What is particularly striking is that despite all these errors, since 2011, Mitkus et al. is used by CDC and other entities as the basis for claiming that aluminum adjuvants are safe.”

oops

The large corporations are indistinguishable from GSEs at this point

Yet more evidence it is 1000% hokum.

BONUS: Yet another analytics firm runs the numbers and finds out the lockdowns were worse than worthless.

At this point the preponderance of evidence is massively against mandated restrictions on the healthy and business. I have posed this question repeatedly to people: what are you doing to prepare for a catastrophic meteor impact? If they say anything but "nothing, as there's nothing anyone can do" I immediately know they put feels before reals. Nobody stopped screwing because of AIDS, they damned sure ain't gonna stop socializing for a cold.

The rona' lockdown has an epidemic of teeth grinding happening.

The emergency measures and lockdowns will however remain.

I might actually think about voting if there would be real peace in Afghanistan and a full withdrawal. It won't happen though.

As you might have guessed given the introduction to the last post here, our journey to enlightenment has not been a quick one. However it seems that it's all starting to fit together in a way that comprehensively makes sense thanks to one of the core "Red Pilled" insights about human nature. Which is somewhat ironic, as that's sort of how our journey into heterodox thinking started -- getting rather brutally exposed to the darker sides of human nature that society downplays during our parents' contentious divorce right as we came into adulthood.

In any case, it's the conception of "mental models", "covert contracts" and ego investment / aspirational self image that ends up explaining most of why the words and actions in all realms don't add up, and when they do add up why that is so. It is quite well trod ground around here as to what the situation actually is -- you live in anarchy and the rules are all made up and ignored for the most part. Rian Stone likes to compare dating to "calvinball", and I've realized that essentially everything is this way. We are all just a mob of individuals making it up as we go along. The reason we make up the rules that we do and then barely follow them is immensely interesting as it completes the praxeological science.

I can write a book's worth of content on this subject, so I suppose I'm gonna be a professional blogger for a while. This means I'll also finally get around to finishing tCMS and making all the features of a CMS that nobody else does because programmers don't generally blog. It seems that solving the "getting de-platformed" problem is still something of an open question without a centralized solution for content creators as well, so maybe there's some opportunity there. In any case, it means big things are coming for this site after 14 years of doing this. Here's to another 14.

Amounts to nothing, because the government never gives a damn about their own rules. Those are for the plebs. The only reason they ever will obey a restriction on themselves is because the individuals doing the enforcing have an ego investment in the whole "rule of law" myth.

Just don't respond to most things. Most correspondence is really just demands for validation and the fact is they could actually figure their problems out for themselves if starved of such validation.

If you want to be surrounded by effective people, this is the best way to winnow out the ineffective, as they value validation over accomplishment.