Observations from today - the sheep are in so deep, even when left off the leash, they won't run now.

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Here in Pennsylvania, our governor was requiring a 70% vaccination rate to drop the mask mandate and open up any further. CDC changed their guidelines out of the blue to no masks for anyone outdoors and vaccinated can go maskless indoors. Many businesses, even large ones like grocery stores, Walmart, etc updated their policy to align.

Rationally, you'd think you'd see people without masks now - probably a lot. With a ~40% fully vaccination rate, rationally about 40% of people would be roaming around without a mask if they're following the rules being fully vaccinated. Another large chunk would probably be unvaccinated, but just say fuck it finally. Given it's free to all and vaccination rates have plateaued, this could very realistically be another 30-40%.

Instead, what we've had is nearly EVERYONE still masked. I'll be transparent - I've been wearing a stupid mask to get into businesses because they'll turn you away and make a scene without one and hire people to stand at entrances. But at this point, really?

Went to get ice cream outside during the week. Maybe 10 people, outside, 85 degree day, plenty of distance around - all wearing masks. Masks to order, masks around their necks eating ice cream, then putting them back on to throw away their trash and walk to cars.

Went to a large grocery store today. Clear signs on the doors saying they've updated to CDC guidelines and no masks are needed for vaccinated people. No one observing at the door. Went in, no mask. No problems. Everyone else, masked up. Some double masked. One person still had latex gloves on like it was March 2020. Went to another large grocery store for some other items - exact same deal. I was only one not wearing a mask.

The most odd thing is you'd rationally think you'd see half maskless, half still clinging to them. Not literally 99% of people still wearing them.

We've been getting back to doing normal monthly meetups with a bunch of guys I do a hobby with. One guy in particular has been very outspoken about how the vaccine is great, getting people appointments early on, etc. He asked if I was vaccinated because he didn't want to go inside a building with me for fear of catching it himself. He's fully vaccinated. What the fuck is going on.

Forget the debate if the vaccine is legitimately fine or not, the real problem here is people are completely brainwashed into cult beliefs. No one can think for themselves. Worst of all, no one is willing to do something different from the herd even when they're 100% allowed.

I actually asked a few vaccinated people (that I know) why they won't take them off. Some were still fearful they'd catch it and the mask protects them (not others). A large chunk didn't want to look like 'conspiracy theorists or Republicans'. Many wanted maskless people to feel guilty and put theirs back on. Some even felt it was their purpose to be out with a mask to get others to wear them, therefore saving lives in their mind.

I've completely given up hope the masses will break lose from the madness. End rant.

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DOJ Seizes $90K, Charges BLM Agitator Who 'Stormed Capitol' And Sold The Footage

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DOJ Seizes $90K, Charges BLM Agitator Who 'Stormed Capitol' And Sold The Footage

US authorities have seized approximately $90,000 from a far-left BLM organizer who 'stormed the capitol' right alongside Trump supporters and sold footage he took of US Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt being shot dead by a Capitol Police Officer.

John Earle Sullivan of Provo, Utah, was also hit with additional criminal charges and now faces a total of eight criminal counts, including weapons charges, according to Reuters. Sullivan is one of more than 440 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 'insurrection' in which Trump supporters who rejected the outcome of the 2020 US election stormed the Capitol with the full support of several Capitol Police officers - some of whom took selfies with the protesters.

After breaking into the Capitol through an open window, Sullivan was heard encouraging protesters to climb a wall to gain entrance.

During one conversation with others while inside, Sullivan said, “We gotta get this [expletive] burned.” At other times, he said, among other things, “it’s our house [expletive]” and “we are getting this [expletive].”

Sullivan told U.S. Capitol Police officers to stand down so that they wouldn’t get hurt, according to the court filing (pdf). He joined the crowd trying to open doors to another part of the Capitol, telling people “Hey guys, I have a knife” and asking them to let him get to the front. He did not make it to the doors. He later tried to get the officers guarding the Speaker’s Lobby to go home, telling them: “Bro, I’ve seen people out there get hurt.”

Following the riot Sullivan appeared on several mainstream television networks CNN and MSNBC, which paid him for the footage.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/22/2021 - 18:00

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CDC's Absurd Guidelines For Summer Camps: A Recipe For Dystopian "Fun"

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CDC's Absurd Guidelines For Summer Camps: A Recipe For Dystopian "Fun"

Authored by Brian McGlinchey via Stark Realities,

The Center for Disease Control’s major easing of its mask-use recommendations was a welcome development, giving Americans hope that logic can triumph over the CDC’s bureaucratic inertia and its Covid-era tendency to push the most severe restrictions on human activity at every turn.

Next, let’s hope this outbreak of rationality proves contagious within the CDC, and brings a major overhaul of the agency’s absurd guidelines for summer camps.

Via North Carolina Health News

CDC Trapped in March 2020 Mindset

In April, the CDC published guidance for operating youth camps that was the latest eye-rolling example of CDC maximalism that conflicts with what we’ve learned about Covid-19.

Before we examine the CDC guidance, let’s review some of the key things that we now know about Covid-19 that we didn’t in March 2020:

• Covid-19 presents little risk at all to children. According to CDC data, only 295 children age 0-17 have died with Covid-19. Compare that to the CDC’s estimation that 600 died of the flu during the 2017-18 season.

• Outdoor transmission pretty much never happens. An Irish study of more than 232,000 Covid-19 cases found only 0.1% of cases were transmitted outside.

• Surface transmission isn’t a material source of spread. The CDC has declared the risk of contracting the virus by touching surfaces or objects is low, and that rather than cleaning with disinfectant, "soap and water is enough to reduce risk" (unless there’s a known or suspected Covid-19 case in a community setting).

• Vaccines are abundantly available. According to the CDC’s vaccination data, 60.5% of U.S. adults have have received at least one vaccine dose, and 48.4% are fully vaccinated. Gone are the days when finding the vaccine was a challenge; today, anyone who wants the vaccine can readily find it.

• Covid-19 cases and deaths are in a free fall. The 7-day averages for cases and deaths have respectively fallen 89% and 83% from their peaks. On Sunday, the entire state of Texas reported not a single death from the virus. Today, San Francisco General Hospital has no Covid-19 patients for the first time since March 2020.

With that knowledge in mind, here are some key ingredients in the CDC’s recipe for dystopian summer fun:

• Two-layer masks should be worn at all times—indoors and out—except for eating, drinking and swimming

• Don’t allow close-contact games and sports

• Avoid sharing of objects such as toys, games and art supplies

• Separate children on buses by skipping rows

• Divide children into "cohorts" and then keep them away from other cohorts

• Children should stay three feet away from kids in their cohort and six feet away from those outside their cohort; campers and staff should stay six feet from each other, as should fellow staff members

• While eating and drinking, stay six feet away from everybody—even your own cohort

Who exactly are these draconian, fun-killing guidelines meant to protect? The children aren’t in any meaningful danger—the number of children who typically drown in a given year is more than double the number of child Covid deaths we’ve observed in 15 months.

Why @drlucymcbride is telling her patients that their kids, vaccinated or not, do not need to wear masks outside—despite @CDCgov summer-camp guidelines that recommend kids wear masks whenever physical distancing is difficult, including outside. https://t.co/eS2WncA0ev

— LenaSun (@bylenasun) May 20, 2021

Meanwhile, against a backdrop of rapidly-vanishing Covid-19 infections across the country, camp staff will have had more than ample opportunity to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 before the first kids arrive.

We’re told to "follow the science," but what is the CDC following? The agency’s guidelines read like they were written during the early dark ages of the Covid outbreak, when the peril was still filled with overwhelming mystery, and "erring on the side of caution" still had a trace of credibility.

As Columbia University pediatric immunologist Mark Gorelik told New York Magazine, "We know that the risk of outdoor infection is very low. We know risks of children becoming seriously ill or even ill at all is vanishingly small. And most of the vulnerable population is already vaccinated. I am supportive of effective measures to restrain the spread of illness. However, the CDC’s recommendations cross the line into excess and are, frankly, senseless. Children cannot be running around outside in 90-degree weather wearing a mask. Period."

Read more and subscribe at https://starkrealities.substack.com/

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/22/2021 - 19:30

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Is The Pentagon's UFO PsyOps Fueling Russia, China War Risk?

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Is The Pentagon's UFO PsyOps Fueling Russia, China War Risk?

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

There are reasons to be skeptical. After decades of stonewalling on the issue, suddenly American military chiefs appear to be giving credence to claims of UFOs invading Earth.

Several viral video clips purporting to show extraordinary flying technology have been “confirmed” by the Pentagon as authentic. The Pentagon move is unprecedented.

The videos of the Unidentified Flying Objects were taken by U.S. air force flight crews or by naval surveillance and subsequently “leaked” to the public. The question is: were the “leaks” authorized by Pentagon spooks to stoke the public imagination of visitors from space? The Pentagon doesn’t actually say what it believes the UFOs are, only that the videos are “authentic”.

A Senate intelligence committee is to receive a report from the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force next month. That has also raised public interest in the possibility of alien life breaching our skies equipped with physics-defying technology far superior to existing supersonic jets and surveillance systems.

Several other questions come to mind that beg skepticism. Why does the phenomenon of UFOs or UAP only seem to be associated with the American military? This goes back decades to the speculation during the 1950s about aliens crashing at Roswell in New Mexico. Why is it that only the American military seems privy to such strange encounters? Why not the Russian or Chinese military which would have comparable detection technology to the Americans but they don’t seem to have made any public disclosures on alien encounters? Such a discrepancy is implausible unless we believe that life-forms from lightyears away have a fixation solely on the United States. That’s intergalactic American “exceptionalism” for you!

Also, the alleged sightings of UFOs invariably are associated with U.S. military training grounds or high-security areas.

Moreover, the released videos that have spurred renewed public interest in UFOs are always suspiciously of poor quality, grainy and low resolution. Several researchers, such as Mick West, have cogently debunked the videos as optical illusions. That’s not to say that the U.S. air force or naval personnel were fabricating the images. They may genuinely believe that they were witnessing something extraordinary. But as rational optics experts have pointed out there are mundane explanations for seeming unusual aerial observations, such as drones or balloons drifting at high speed in differential wind conditions, or by the crew mistaking a far-off aircraft dipping over the horizon for an object they believe to be much closer.

The military people who take the videos in good – albeit misplaced – faith about what they are witnessing are not the same as the military or intelligence people who see an opportunity with the videos to exploit the public in a psychological operation.

Fomenting public anxieties, or even just curiosity, about aliens and super-technology is an expedient way to exert control over the population. At a time when governing authorities are being questioned by a distrustful public and when military-intelligence establishments are viewed as having lost a sense of purpose, what better way to realign public respect by getting them to fret over alien marauders from whom they need protection?

There is here a close analogy to the way foreign nations are portrayed as adversaries and enemies in order to marshal public support or least deference to the governing establishment and its military. We see this ploy played over and over again with regard to the U.S. and Western demonization of Russia and China as somehow conveying a malign intent towards Western societies. In other words, it’s a case of Cold War and UFOs from the same ideological launchpad, so to speak, in order to distract public attention from internal problems.

However, more worrying still is that there is a dangerous reinforcing crossover of the two propaganda realms. The fueling of UFO speculation is feeding directly into speculation that U.S. airspace is being invaded by high-tech weapons developed by Russia or China.

U.S. lawmakers are demanding answers from the Pentagon about whether the aerial “encounters” are advanced weaponry from foreign enemies who are surveilling the American homeland at will. Some U.S. air force aviators have recently expressed to the media a feeling of helplessness in the face of seeming superior technology.

At a time of heightened animosity towards Russia and China and febrile talk among Pentagon chiefs about the possibility of all-out war, it is not difficult to imagine, indeed it is disturbingly easy to imagine, how optical illusions about alien phenomena could trigger false alarms attributed to Russian or Chinese military incursions.

The government has never told the truth about anything yet suddenly is coming clean on aliens and UFOs. pic.twitter.com/LcHgoUj4vw

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) May 22, 2021

The stoking of UFO controversy appears to be a classic psyops perpetrated by U.S. military intelligence for the objective of population control. Its aim is to corral the citizenry under the authority of the state and for them to accept the protector function of “our” military. The big trouble is that the psyops with aliens are, in turn, risking the exacerbation of fears and tensions with Russia and China.

With all the Pentagon-assisted chatter, it is more likely that an F-18 squadron could mistake an errant weather balloon on the horizon for an alien spacecraft. And amid our new Cold War tensions, it is but a small conceptual step to further imagine that the UFO is not from outer space but rather is a Russian or Chinese hypersonic cruise missile heading towards the U.S. mainland.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/22/2021 - 21:30

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Everything Keeps Getting Weirder And Weirder

Back in 2019 I wrote an article titled “Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder“, and from Covid to the 2020 election to the steadily increasing regularity with which UFOs are now mentioned in the mainstream media, that has indeed proved to be the case.

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The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust

This year has marked the first time ever that trust in news media dropped below fifty percent in the United States, continuing a trend of decline that’s been ongoing for years.

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Miss Anthropist 2.0 🌸 #KBF

Hypnotherapists have been noticing blatant hypnosis and NLP techniques (for example, the Milton Model: Hypnotic Language Patterns) being used by the government and state-controlled media during the pandemic. (1)

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Why Did Twitter Censor An Eminent Infectious Disease Expert For His Opinion On COVID Vaccines?

In March, Harvard epidemiologist and vaccine expert Dr. Martin Kulldorff was subjected to censorship by Twitter for sharing his opinion that not everybody needed to take the COVID vaccine.

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The Takeover has Already Begun - A Secret Video Reveals All

Marxist Communism won't look like how it did before. It's more than coincidence that what we see now is straight out of a Communist Handbook in 1966. Original Video Here: https://youtu.be/Z3LTrqv3sFE -Richard Grannon

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FOMO Is Loco

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FOMO Is Loco

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

We can also posit a general rule that those who inherit wealth and succumb to FOMO are eventually less wealthy while those who are wealthy and take a pass on FOMO / hoarding at the top of the manic frenzy increase their wealth.

Judging by the panic buying of everything from homes to yachts to lumber futures, it seems the world has run out of everything except newly issued central bank trillions, and so the logical response is FOMO (fear of missing out) and hoarding: buy everything you can get your hands on today lest it become unavailable or more expensive tomorrow.

FOMO is wonderful for sellers and profiteers who can jack up prices and enjoy bidding wars during the panic buying.

FOMO and hoarding are instinctual behaviors to shortages, perceived and real. There's nothing quite like the surge onto the last bus or train of the day when transport is scarce. Cash becomes trash when you need whatever is scarce and you're afraid you won't be able to get it at any price.

All this is rational when the threat of what happens if you miss out is existential. As in, not getting in a boat means you drown, not getting some water means you die of thirst, etc.

But is not being able to buy a new pleasure craft or home in a desirable area really the same? It feels the same way to the individuals caught up in the frenzy of FOMO, but FOMO and hoarding feel the same whether the scarcity is real or perceived, and the emotions triggered by scarcity are urgently intense: if I lose this bidding war, my life is over, etc.

On a lesser but still painful level, we don't like losing or being left behind as the circus leaves town. If you've ever been bumped from an airline flight or been unable to get on that last train, watching all the shiny happy people board the aircraft while you're left in the fetid terminal with the janitorial crew is not a warm and fuzzy feeling.

There's another intense emotion that comes into play a bit later: buyer's remorse. The bidding war arouses an excitement quite unlike other forms of engagement, and the euphoria of winning feels like the jackpot is yours, ripped from the greedy grasp of the undeserving at the last moment.

Then the euphoria fades and the sick realization that you're on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars sinks in. At this point regret that one forgot the rational, calculating part of the mind and dashed head-long into the "last seat on the lifeboat / last roll of toilet paper" FOMO / hoarding.

One of my rules is to consider what benefits those at the top of the wealth-power pyramid. If we consider the case for hyper-inflation, for example, it's difficult to make a case for hyper-inflation benefiting those who own the majority of the nation's financial assets, i.e. the top 0.5%. Yes, the super-wealthy can move all their wealth into gold and bitcoin, but this requires sacrificing the income from all the assets that were sold to escape hyper-inflation.

Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just call a friend or three and make it known that hyper-inflation doesn't work for you? Needless to say, it also doesn't work for the bottom 99.5% whose earnings spiral down the drain in hyper-inflation.

We can also posit a general rule that those who inherit wealth and succumb to FOMO are eventually less wealthy while those who are wealthy and take a pass on FOMO / hoarding at the top of the manic frenzy increase their wealth, as they anticipate a symmetric deflation in most of the FOMO / hoarding price spikes.

In other words, it's worth pondering the possibility that cash won't always be trash, and that overbidding by $400,000 to get "the last house in Cape Cod" overlooked the possibility that it wasn't actually the last house and that suitable alternatives might be remarkably less expensive in a year.

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Tyler Durden Sat, 05/22/2021 - 12:00

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