Rather than using social media as a notebook, it seemed better to establish a separate optionally accessible site: Signal to Noise. The benefit of a members-only site is it reduces trolling. The Belmont Club will remain open and free, as usual. To keep the length manageable, I will start a new notebook every week or so. Sign up here to become a VIP member.
The establishment’s counterinsurgency strategy
The establishment’s counterinsurgency doctrine is based on the assumption the opposition is a mirror image of themselves. In other words, a conspiracy with ringleaders, rabid ideology and secret funders, like themselves. There are no “root causes” — how could there be?
But this is only partially true of Revolts From Nowhere. Even as the chekists count the heads of the supposed ringleaders the rebellion mysteriously continues. That is because they leave God out of the equation, or the Facts, which is the alias He frequently lives under.
Who could have foreseen?
Oil could vault as high as $150 a barrel, veteran analyst warns, as undersupply meets surging demand
After 30 Years of Peace, Ukraine Crisis Shakes Europeans. The irony was the danger returned just when climate change, gender inequality and white supremacist math were the only remaining problems facing the world.
Canadian banking system stutters as Trudeau anti-trucker money rules kick in
The new rules make demands of a broad list of entities—including banks, investment firms, credit unions, loan companies, securities dealers, fundraising platforms, insurance companies and fraternal benefit societies. They must determine whether they’re in “possession or control of property” of a person who’s attending an illegal protest or providing supplies to demonstrators, according to orders published by the government late Tuesday night.
Justin Trudeau repurposing the whole financial system to catch his trucker political enemies is like Wile E. Coyote balancing a thousand ton desert boulder as a deadfall trap to catch Roadrunner.
The government’s new directive, called the “emergency economic measures order,” goes beyond asking banks to simply stop transferring funds to protest organizers. The government wants banks to stop doing business with some people altogether.
The rehabilitation of fossil fuels
Biden officials dispatched to Saudi Arabia to discuss energy concerns amid Russia-Ukraine crisis
A day late and a barrel short.
Biden braces Americans for higher energy prices if Russia invades Ukraine. The sanction strategy is equivalent to collective self-harm, hoping Putin dies first. It’s like those movie scenes where the hero throws the villain down the stairwell and jumps after him, counting on breaking the fall by landing on the corpse of the bad guy.
The administration’s volte-faces in response to face plants suggest their platform was never quite in sync with reality. The admin was a curious creature with the body of Joe Biden and the mind of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.
The end of compulsory masking
Nevada, a swing state with a Democratic governor, joined New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, California and other states that have recently announced an end date for mask requirements and other COVID restrictions.
It was reality that killed the beast.
The manacles of certainty
Why Ideology Is the Ancient Enemy of Civilization. “What ultimately destroyed the evil empires of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were bankrupt dogmas. Crackpot ideology … The Nazi idea of a superior Aryan race adjudicated everything from physics to tank design. Soviet commissars did the same, subordinating rational thought to communist agendas.”
The state of Denmark
I wonder why Putin is making enemies he can ill-afford?
https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/02/10/denmark-allow-us-troops/
Is Paris Honking?
French ‘freedom convoys’ head towards Paris police checkpoints
Macron urges calm as French “Freedom Convoys” approach Paris
And in Australia …
Incredible scenes as anti-vaccine mandate protestors swarm Canberra streets
Is Trudeau losing his fight against truckers?
I think the progressives don’t know what to do. It’s obvious to them that something momentous is happening but there’s no explanation for it in any of the tomes in Revolution Bookstore. So in dismay they fall back on “it’s Nazis!”, which translates as ” ’tis witchcraft!”
Foreign intelligence
Senators: CIA has secret program that collects American data
Canadian border crisis
Ottawa considering warrantless arrest. Message to Demonstrators from the Ottawa Police Service. “You could be arrested without a warrant for this offence if you are a party to the offence or assisting others in the direct or indirect commission in this offence. Whether you are released on bail depends on factors contained in Part XVI of the Criminal Code.”
The Paris police ban a protest convoy inspired by the Ottawa demonstration
Automakers Are Hobbled by Blockades at U.S.-Canada Border. Major car companies shut down Canadian operations as protests threaten the economy.
U.S. officials urge Canada to get control of spiraling crisis. US urges Canada to use federal powers to end bridge blockade. U.S. offers Trudeau government help to end border blockade.
Truck convoys are the Color Revolutions of the 2020s
Despite setbacks, Woke is not over. We are only at the dawn of a drawn out religious war.
1. One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs.
2. The void of meaning still hasn’t been filled.
3. Social atomization hasn’t reversed …
6. There is no authority.I think humanity has always been embroiled in some form of religious war. In the 20th century, WW1, WW2 and Cold War 1 were titanic struggles over belief. That conflicts should continue into networks, AI, social engineering is unsurprising. Satan has a version of Augustine’s famous line. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Dostoevsky saw this symmetry when he wrote in Brothers Karamazov “Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
Money for nothing and your kicks for free
Why the $30 Trillion National Debt Could Soon Blow Up in Our Face
Nonsense. Modern monetary theory says we don’t have to worry about a thing.
Covid in Denmark
The country became the first in the EU to lift all COVID restrictions despite leading the world in per capita infections. … “If you are following Denmark’s infection numbers, this seems like a very, very strange thing to do,” Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish researcher who led a global survey of COVID attitudes and advises the Danish government, told me. But Petersen defends the decision. Because of falling ICU admissions and shorter hospital stays, he said, COVID is no longer a socially critical sickness in Denmark. — Atlantic
The strategic question is: over time will there be more Denmarks, more Rogans, more unseen protesters — or fewer of them? I think there will be more of them because the potential energy stored up in the last 2 years has to unwind.
Lost Yemen
“The Houthis have won the war in Yemen, defeating their opponents in the civil war, the Saudis who intervened in 2015 against them, and the United States which backed the Saudis.” — Brookings. What next? It’s another cleanup job on aisle Biden.
Drama in Canada
Watching the showdown between Trudeau and unspecified cast of oppositionists through the filter of media spin and ‘fact-checking’ resembles a real life reenactment of the Shooting of Dan McGrew. “I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark.”
Revolt of the Canadian Truckers
Meeting engagements in the culture wars
What we are now witnessing in the disputes rocking the Australian Open, Spotify, Marvel and the trucking world are spontaneous meeting engagements in the culture wars. It’s like a chain reaction. The singular thing about this development is that it would have been impossible 6 months ago. A psychological barrier has shattered and a taboo has fallen. This does not mean one side or the other has necessarily gained the upper hand, it is merely the sound of a gauntlet hitting the floor. Most people psychologically want to get along, especially nonpolitical folk, unless grievance passes a threshold. People are reluctant to complain about bad food in a diner but once it starts, if the grub stinks, a chorus soon erupts. The social science name for this is preference falsification. According to the economist Timur Kuran, it is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures as when we tell the host … we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland.
A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.
In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.
