Word from the Dark Side – woke church, what’s happening to BA pilots, watch out for cancellers and a weird morning in Sapporo

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

This Is Not The Way Home by the Cruel Sea, 1993. Australian band with American singer. You can’t really get lost that easily in the outback – there are so few roads that directions can be as simple as, ‘Go straight, turn left on Wednesday.’

The Anglican Church in Sydney makes a few changes:

The conservative Sydney Anglicans will encourage ministers to call gender diverse parishioners by their preferred names, provide unisex bathrooms and avoid gendered language such as “ladies and gentlemen”.

The Auckland chapter of New Zealand’s School Strike 4 Climate group decides it is too racist to exist and disbands.

Four healthy British Airways pilots die in one week – airline says no link to Covid-19 vaccine.

A minor high school kerfuffle turns into a national crisis because race is involved.

Nixon intervention saved China from Soviet nuclear attack. I have no idea if a word of this is true.

Woman Who Threatened to Blow Up School Bus Full of Kids Now Running for Office.

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Where’s Dong?

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Source: https://www.deviantart.com/bradysarlo/art/Spy-vs-Spy-71618441

Dong Jingwei is kind of a big deal. He’s a vice minister of State Security, essentially China’s head spy catcher, and he’s also said to be close to Pooh Bear, having assisted in his rise to the top.

RedState and Chinese-language blogs are reporting that in February this year he defected to the United States’ Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and handed over a treasure trove of material. Some mainstream sites have now picked up the story.

Here’s what he’s said to have provided, via RedState:

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Friday Finance: how to diversify your cash and bonds

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

https://i1.wp.com/moneyaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/pie-chart.jpg
Source: moneyaz.com

This is an extract from The Poor Man’s Guide to Financial Freedom: A Realistic, 10-Step Manual to Building Liberating Wealth on a Small to Medium Budget.

Diversify Within Investment Classes

So far we have looked at diversifying between defensive and growth assets in order to set an appropriate level of risk.

To further spread that risk, it is essential to diversify within each category, as well.  For example, it would be madness to hold only one share.  The company might go bankrupt.  It is much safer to invest across many shares.

In this section we’ll go through each class of investments and show how to diversify within it in order to manage risk.

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Dystopia

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

We’ve reached dystopia.

I first became familiar with the concept of the declining West in the early days of the manosphere, reading Roissy, Captain Capitalism and co. I found their gloomy thinking overwrought – it’s too easy to imagine the end of the world is nigh when society is moving away from your own values or when a candidate you particularly dislike wins an election.

I became increasingly convinced that our civilization was teetering from 2013 on due to the Great Awokening. Still, I thought there’d eventually be a pendulum swing-back or some natural correction. Trees don’t grow to the sky.

I remember a commenter saying, get offline and look outside. People are going about their business, leading normal lives. In the real world, everything’s fine.

In 2020 I became a believer.

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Resistance

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Ever have to deal with a naughty kid?

Adult: Toby! I told you to put those toys away.

Kid: I am putting them away.

Adult: No you’re not, you’re playing with that truck. Put them away now.

Kid: Okay, okay. (Continues to play)

Adult: Toby, I’m going to stand right here and watch you put those toys away.

(Kid begins picking up the smallest toys and putting them away at a glacial pace, waiting for the adult to turn his back.)

Adult: Ten. Nine. Eight. (Toby will finish right on zero. Occasionally slightly after to test the boundary.)

This power play increases the cost of enforcement.

The more resistance, the more resources have to be put into compelling people to follow the rules.

Right now there’s yet another lockdown and we’re not allowed to go to the beach. First we feigned ignorance and got shoed away. We gave some cheek to the enforcers. Not enough to get arrested; just enough to annoy them and make them sick of telling people off for swimming at the beach. Enough that they’ll ask to be reassigned or reconsider their line of work. Demoralize them. Make it clear that, while they didn’t make the rules, they’re going to feel our ire for enforcing them.

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Word from the Dark Side – the right to party, crypto revelations, restricting efficacious meds and riding the (mall) lightning

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBShN8qT4lk
Fight for Your Right by The Beastie Boys, 1986.

I had a request to explain the 80s for the kids via another video clip. This one is as good as any but I can’t be bothered pulling it apart scene by scene. I think you’ll get it. Drink every time something politically incorrect happens.

We no longer fight for our right to paaartay, do we?

All parties are banned across the Philippines until further notice. The rule is not being consistently enforced. After fifteen months, there has yet to be any public health campaign warning people not to share the same cup of rum as traditionally happens at these parties.

They always attempt the hard or impossible but ignore the easy things. ‘Give grandpa his own cup.’ Much as I’d like to chalk this up as yet another piece of Third World incompetence and stupidity, rich countries are doing little better.

I feel like a broken record. Let’s move on.

I was going to do a story about the Indian Miracle: infection rates are plummeting there like no where else in the world. However, I found that Phil Ebersole has already written what I was going to say: ivermectin very likely has something to do with it.

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Friday Finance: Past performance is no guarantee of future performance

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

This is an extract from The Poor Man’s Guide to Financial Freedom: A Realistic, 10-Step Manual to Building Liberating Wealth on a Small to Medium Budget.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance

Here’s a common rookie investing error: you see that Acme Corp. goes up 14% in 2018.  Then it goes up another 16% in 2019.  You think, I must buy Acme shares, and quickly!  You buy . . . and then in 2020 the share price falls by 22%.  : (

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Dissicoin

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Image credit: https://www.forextime.com/uk   

A have a half-baked idea. Maybe quarter-baked.

The trouble with cryptocurrencies is that few are actually being used as currency. Instead they’re being used for speculation. Transactions that are made, are often transferred immediately back into fiat.

The original inspiration for bitcoin is yet to be realized – unimpeded trade across borders using a stable currency subject to no government control or manipulation.

Perhaps we could get things moving by making a gentlemen’s agreement to use a particular coin or token for trade within the dissident sphere.

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Stone the crows and gas the Aussies

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

There is a trend to describe new culture battles in terms of ‘public health’ in an attempt to piggyback various agendas on the shoulders of Covid panic.

BLM protests are okay amid Covid lockdowns because racism is a public health threat. Calling someone by the wrong pronouns is a public health risk because it causes suicide. Climate change is a public health risk. That sort of thing.

Got one more for you:

The Climate Council warns the use of gas in homes is exposing Australian children to a higher risk of asthma, as well as driving climate change . . .

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Word from the Dark Side – venal drug companies, vibrating tanks, vanishing P2P lenders and virus-laced footballs

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Winter Solstice by The Tea Party. Bigger wankers the music world has rarely seen, but I like them.

What’s Fauci been up to? Remember, (a) no one is too big to be cancelled and (b) getting enemies cancelled is a fool’s game because there are millions more overeducated twits languishing in casual work desperate to take their places.

Anyway, Fauci still doesn’t win the prize for the world’s dumbest public health officer.

A plane carrying vaccines from Dubai to Taiwan quietly skirted Chinese airspace and Flight Information Region (most of the South China Sea), adding two hours to the flight.

Covid and the “crime of the century“:

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Friday Finance: weird and wonderful investment ideas

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

This is an extract from The Poor Man’s Guide to Financial Freedom: A Realistic, 10-Step Manual for Building Liberating Wealth on a Low to Medium Income.

Growth Assets 3: Alternatives to Shares and Real Estate

Most people trying to build wealth content themselves with simply investing in shares, or in shares plus their own home.  A few purchase an investment property.  Such conventional options are fine.

However, there are alternatives.  Here I list a few for the more adventurous or unconventional investor.  Like enlightenment, there are different paths to financial freedom.  If the Roman Catholicism of shares and real estate is not for you, perhaps these Hare Krishna options might be of interest.

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Third World solutions

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

As the West declines, solutions from the Third World become applicable. And not just generators and pre-filled barrels for when the water stops.

Eritrea is the most repressive dictatorship in Africa. But did you know, on the Red Sea coast opposite Saudi Arabia there live a Muslim minority group called the Rashaida (search: ‘Madote Rashaida’ for more information. I can’t link directly for secret reasons.)

Despite the oppressive government, they pretty much do whatever they want and are left alone. They are not enslaved under the open-ended National Service program that ruins the lives of most other groups. How do they get away with it? And is it not interesting that they were also left alone by the Italian colonists?

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More India hysteria

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

This time the BBC headline screams, The Indian Children Orphaned by Covid-19.

In India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, more than 1,000 Covid orphans had been identified, said Dr Preeti Verma, a member of the state’s child welfare commission.

This is to make you believe the Indian variant is coming to kill you right after it succeeds in largely depopulating India.

Look, that figure could be true. Could be. Perhaps these children were being cared for by their grandparents or a single parent who was unwell.

There are around 330,000 Covid deaths so far.

India is an enormous country where any problem is magnified by sheer numbers. In 2017, 650,000 died from influenza and/or pneumonia, 470,000 from TB and 430,000 from diarrhea (source).

More total deaths from that year:

Diabetes: 300,000

Traffic accidents: 270,000

Falls: 200,000

Suicide: 200,000

Anyway, let’s do the numbers:

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Once a prison island . . .

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

The First Fleet Ships (Convicts) | Discovery of Australia | Seacraft Gallery

Convicts sent to Australia from England and Ireland were sentenced to either seven years of hard labour, fourteen years or life. None were allowed to return home. That was the punishment: to live out their lives on the opposite side of the world, far from civilization.

Those who escaped mostly assimilated into Aboriginal tribes beyond the frontier of settlement. Finding a berth for the perilous, eight-month return journey was almost impossible.

In one of history’s customary ironies, some convicts found life in the antipodal hellscape agreeable enough to send for their families, a policy encouraged due to the severe sex imbalance. Colonial women frequently suffered problems during labour because they were small from growing up in poverty while their unborn babies grew large from their mother’s new, protein-rich diet.

They were still poor but land was plentiful and mutton was cheap.

Few of the big, colonial-born subjects of the Empire returned to their ancestral homelands. They were allowed to but the tyranny of distance meant that few could even consider such a journey.

In later years, many Europeans would emigrate as free settlers in hope of a better life. Like the convicts, their farewells were mostly final as few saw their relatives in the old country again.

In 2021, we see a rebirth of this strange phenomenon of prison-island-as-haven.

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Word from the Dark Side – America’s new flag, an army’s airy-fairy antics, Afghans are acoming, amorous J-cops (again) and the art of cheering up

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks who just turned 73 and is still performing

Note: I bookmark interesting links from all over the place and usually forget where I found them. If you reckon I got one from you, feel free to give yourself a HT in the comments.

And Moldbugman, I forgive you and I’ve called off the hit.

In the news, BLM flags are fluttering over US embassies worldwide during this holiest of weeks.

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Friday Finance: the trouble with REITs

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2019/7/13/saupload_REIT-Real-Estate-Investment-Trusts-2.png

This is an extract from The Poor Man’s Guide to Financial Freedom: A Realistic, 10-Step Manual for Building Liberating Wealth on a Low to Medium Income.

REITs

There is a way to invest only a small portion of your capital in property instead of buying a whole house.  This is through a fund that pools investor money and uses it to invest in many properties.  Such a fund is usually called a real estate investment trust (REIT, pronounced ‘reet’).  Through this vehicle, you can put exactly as much or as little of your wealth into property as you want, with plenty left over for investing in shares and bonds in order to better diversify your holdings. 

In addition, these REITs can invest in a variety of types of properties, i.e. mortgages, commercial office space, or retail, and they can invest across many locations, thus significantly reducing the risk should any one investment go bad.  For some investors, this can be a good way of getting into property without having all the hassle of owning an actual house.

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Rhetoric vs reality on vaccines

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Rhetoric vs Logic

I try to keep things real here, though I sometimes descend into a rant or silliness. The People’s Blog might as well be a private discussion board as normal people don’t come here and if they do, they don’t linger. We can speak freely and acknowledge complications.

When speaking publicly, a less measured approach is more effective.

For example, lockdowns.

Realistically, I’m open to the idea that they may reduce infection rates temporarily in some cases but am against them because (a) the costs do not outweigh the benefits according to my own values and (b) we should not exchange freedom for a little safety except in extreme cases. It usually turns out badly, from banning dope to arbitrary War on Terror laws that are still on the books today.

If speaking in another forum I wouldn’t choose those words.

Ordinary people are not compelled by nuanced arguments. The world’s greatest orators didn’t move crowds by saying, “On one hand, I guess I can see their point of view on x, but on the other hand . . .” Did Cicero ever make a speech like that? Did Lincoln?

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Infection fatality rate

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

[I brought this post forward as the issue is presently under discussion]

We all learned a bit of epidemiological jargon over the last year, hey?

The term ‘infection fatality rate’ means:

. . . the proportion of deaths among all infected individuals, including all asymptomatic and undiagnosed subjects. It is closely related to the CFR [case fatality rate], but attempts to additionally account for inapparent infections among healthy people.

The case fatality rate means the death rate among those diagnosed with the disease and will necessarily be higher than the IFR.

I wanted to know: overall, if you get infected with Covid, what are your chances of survival? I saw a big argument about this online with some saying it was way over 1% and some saying it was way less.

Let’s get to the bottom of it.

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