The Post-Partisan Emporium

A Hinge Moment of History by  Mark Steyn Mark Steyn. (Image source: Mark Blevis/Flickr) It was certainly the weirdest year. It began with a supremely weird decision by the entire world, except China and Sweden, to tank the global economy. No one has ever done that before. The only major economic power to grow last year was China whose GDP is up by, I think, about 2.5 percent compared to declines everywhere else, including some actually catastrophic ones, such as 11% in the UK. This decision to tank the entire global economy is something that strengthened China, the creator of the virus, and the exporter of the virus, and weakened any opposition to China -- and that is how they began. This first year of the new weirdness ended with the United States government pretending that its principal threat is a domestic terrorism movement that does not exist. This is the characterization of the so‑called insurrection on January 6th. We were told two weeks later that there were going to be mas...

Now That the American Dream Is Reserved for the Wealthy, The Smart Crowd Is Opting Out Charles Hugh Smith The already-wealthy and their minions are unprepared for the Smart Crowd opting out. Clueless economists are wringing their hands about the labor shortage without looking at the underlying causes, one of which is painfully obvious:  the American economy now only works for the top 10%; the American Dream of  turning labor into capital  is now reserved for the already-wealthy. As a result  the Smart Crowd  is opting out of the conventional workforce's debt-overwork-deadend-treadmill.  What clueless economists, pundits and politicos don't dare acknowledge is that credentials and hard work are not a ticket to middle-class security; they're a ticket to impossible workloads demanded by global corporations and high-cost lifestyles anchored by student-loan debt, high rents and out-of-reach real estate. In other words, credentials and hard work are a deadend. ...

The master plan behind the Covid crisis THIS is the translated transcript* of a presentation entitled ‘Uncovering the Corona Narrative’ by the German author and journalist Ernst Wolff, which he delivered in late August. It can be viewed  here  in the original. There are subtitles. Wolff is a German author and journalist whose long-term focus of criticism has been the global financial and monetary system, especially the role of the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bretton Woods system and the worldwide fiat money.  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiatmoney.asp  Here he details the unfolding global health and economic crisis consequent on the Covid-19 lockdowns and addresses the question of who has an interest in this destructive agenda. *** The American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said: ‘Nothing happens accidentally in politics and when something happens, you can bet on it that it was exactly planned that way.’ When one looks at what’s h...

Gaming Measurement of Vaccine Efficacy Mathew Crawford Biostatistics Professor and  data science blogger  Jeffrey Morris writes, We (meaning those of us who are paying attention to the vaccine studies) are all aware of the Kaplan-Meier curves that show that antibody buildup seems to ramp up to effective levels at around 10 days after vaccination. And yet, clever as the hivemind may be, none of us has yet devised a way to vaccinate people in such a way that  the first 14 days don't actually happen . The problem is that when discussing the most important aspects of medical intervention (such as risk-benefit analysis), starting measurement of efficacy at that point  makes no sense . But it may not be clear why it doesn't make sense to some people, and bias may get in the way. In order to sort out such temptations to reset basic modeling principles (like to pretend away the first 14 days because  maximal efficacy  doesn't yet take place), the experienced mathem...