A background to Australian authoritarianism

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Victoria Police arrest and put a face mask on a protester outside of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.
Image source: AAP

When I was a kid, the suburbs on a Sunday were peaceful and still. The only noise would be children playing, hoses spraying, an occasional radio or lawnmower in the distance, warbling magpies and the wind through the leaves.

The one sound noticeably missing was the usual, steady drone of traffic common in every major city.

This was a perfect time to play cricket or kick-to-kick on the street. Kids would only have to pause every half hour or so to let a car pass, if that. Every back street became a playground.

This idyllic day of rest had a singular cause: Sunday was trading was illegal.

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Word from the Dark Side – a requiem, revolving-door regulators, rabid overreactions and robotic grandchildren

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Ein deutsches Requiem by Brahms, composed 1865-1868. This recording by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, 2019.

The Revolving Door: All 3 FDA-authorized COVID shot companies now employ former FDA commissioners

Have an experimental drug that needs rapid authorization from the FDA in order to be sold to the masses? Looking to siphon billions of dollars from the U.S. taxpayer for your newfound pharmaceutical product? In today’s America, you can buy yourself a former FDA commissioner, and use the public-sector private-sector revolving door system of corruption to impose your will on the American public, and make a windfall for your executives and shareholders in the process.

Much the same as financial regulators.

Jew Among You notices that some overcorrect against the hype:

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Friday Finance: 6 reasons to change your investments

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.

Reevaluate

How often should you review your investments and consider whether you need to make alterations?

Once a year, or when your circumstances change, i.e. you have quintuplets or you lose both your legs in a lion-taming accident.  Fiddling with it any more frequently than that will probably be a waste of time and effort, and might be counterproductive.  A watched pot and all that.  Feel free to examine your investments frequently, but if you change them more than once or twice a year, you’re playing with them.  Hands off! 

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The advantage of vice

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

I knew a guy called Dale. He was a classic alpha; a rugged, handsome baseball coach, sporty and athletic as you’d expect. However, he had a prominent beer gut.

Dale was a drinker. He’d stay out so late on a Saturday night that every Sunday would be wiped out. Whatever plans he had would have to be cancelled because he’d sleep in and be crook as a dog until late afternoon.

One day, out of the blue, he declared that he was going to quit drinking altogether. Though I suspect he was an alcoholic, his stated aim was to get more done. He saw how much of his life was being pissed up the wall and decided he needed to change if he was going to get anywhere.

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Evolving epistemology

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

We weren’t supposed to believe in early treatments for Covid using existing medications.

There were not enough double-blind trials that controlled for confounding variables published in peer-reviewed journals.

The experts dismissed it.

Official bodies such as the WHO and the CDC warned against it.

The smart people followed the science and decided certain medicines should not be allowed in the treatment of Covid.

There’s something wrong with the way the rational, modern man forms his beliefs.

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Word from the Dark Side – Tears Go By, trusting the FDA, terrorist strikers and terminator robots

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Preliminary trial suggests aspirin may lower the risk of Covid quite a bit. If so, how was that missed?

Days after this news, we are warned that adults should stop taking aspirin to prevent heart attacks.

Half of all doctors do not trust the FDA drug approval process. This relates more to a controversial Alzheimer’s treatment than to recent vaccines:

“The erosion [of my confidence] is based on the disastrously bad decision to approve aducanumab (Aduhelm), which seems like a poorly developed and even possibly corrupt decision,” he told surveyors. “I cannot remember a similar situation in which there was so much dismay and disbelief created by an FDA decision. We do not plan to use aducanumab at this time and we no longer know what to think about and how much to trust any future FDA decisions.”

This is not a new issue. Here’s an excellent 2013 article from a Harvard ethics body warning of the way things were going. Their conclusion:

Advice to readers: Experienced, independent physicians recommend not to take a new drug approved by the FDA until it is out for 7 years, unless you have to, so that evidence can accumulate about its real harms and benefits.10

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Friday Finance: robo-advisors

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

https://article.images.consumerreports.org/prod/content/dam/cro/news_articles/money/CRO_Money_Robot_Accountant_10-14

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.

Robo-Advisors

While it’s cute to imagine a robo-advisor as an actual, 1970s sci-fi style robot sitting in an office, wearing an adorable tie around its thick, metallic neck, and giving you financial advice in a camp C-3PO voice, disappointingly it is just a glorified financial calculator.  You plug in your data through a survey and an algorithm spits out suggestions based on your circumstances.  These are sometimes called ‘automated investment advisors’ or ‘digital advice platforms’, but ‘robo-advisor’ sounds much cooler, so let’s stick with that.

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Interesting times

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Are you not entertained?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in Weimar Germany, see the Turks topple the walls of Constantinople or witness one of the gargantuan Chinese wars?

The old Chinese saying is, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Their history tends to oscillate between centuries of not much happening and decades so terrible that the population plummets by millions. The boring times are better.

But you have to admit, interesting times are interesting.

The clownish decline of the West, so hilarious back in 2014, is now disturbingly real. But still clownish.

You can’t complain that there’s nothing in the news. The official news, of course, is full of rubbish but even those lies are funny in their own way. As to actual events, they are insane.

You could have lived in a sleepy Mesopotamian century where nothing changed at all, or in an Amazonian village cut off from the world, or in a dusty outback town where the most exciting thing that ever happened was the arrival of the first motor car.

Instead you live here, now.

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Weaponized stupidity

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Here I use the word ‘stupidity’ in a particular way: people acting dumber than they ought by seizing upon politically useful falsehoods or ignoring politically unwelcome facts.

Case 1:

There’s a long list of replies to this tweet you can read for yourself that also mock those retarded white supremacist anti-vaxxers for using a veterinary product.

While there are some grey areas here, these are the facts that the FDA branch of our ruling elite are ignoring:

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Friday Finance: how good is ‘too good to be true’?

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/happy-woman-under-a-dollar-rain-picture-id686727704?k=6&m=686727704&s=612x612&w=0&h=lAW4rY8mBi6uXS0zHOH2B7gb6D6w2tPLa3kAFX4p62Q=

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 Income.

“If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

The easiest way to spot a scam is to understand what returns are reasonable, and what returns are not.  Here is a quick recap:

Cash:  A term deposit or high interest account might provide a safe return of about 2-3% return in normal times, or 6% in special cases such as shortly after the Great Recession began. [Edit: cash rates now extremely low, often less than 1%.]

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Choose the right battlefield

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Battle speech: The King walks among his men and climbs into a wagon as he delivers his stirring pep talk, probably the best pre-battle speech ever written. It includes lines like, "For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother" and is accompanied by an orchestra that must be hiding in the trees.   Chaaarge!: The King's forces wait for the French, who charge through the mud with faces that have a magnetic attraction to arrows.     Creative kill: In what might be the only non-sword kill of this battle, an Englishman drowns a Frenchman in a muddy puddle.   Hero vs. villain moment: King Henry and Constable Charles d'Albret, the commander of the French forces, don't come face-to-face. Instead, the constable dies after uttering the words, "Shame, and eternal shame, nothing but shame," as Henry mashes like a medieval Schwarzenegger.
Source

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

It is not a waste of time to try to pull people out of the Covidian cult. We can pick them off the herd individually. It will take time. Some methods are more efficient than others.

There’s no point bickering over what has already come to pass. Rather, our goal should be to start from today and work towards returning to sanity as soon as possible. That might not be a full-scale soul searching about all that went wrong. More likely, we will have to satisfy ourselves with a return to normality and an embarrassed, historical deep-filing of the whole episode, like the interning of Germans during WWI.

Covid will end when the headlines end.

Who?

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Manospheric nostalgia

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

The greatest moment in Manosphere history was when prolific MGTOW commenter Mark Minter suddenly announced that he was getting married to a female commenter. After years of being the internet’s most strident anti-marriage voice, this attracted some blowback. He responded by pointing out how young his bride was and proclaiming, ‘Top that motherf*ckers.’

Wonder what happened to them. I wish them all the best.

Reading through old manosphere blogs is like dusting off relics from a distant past.

A lot of them are gone or have moved on. Chateau Heartiste got nuked and now reserves his snark for a small Gab following. Roosh realized he wasn’t going to be picking up Poles for a living into his sixties and found a new path. The Rational Male has largely monetized his esoteric hobby.

Remember The Spearhead? Go check out what happened to that domain. Actually I’d better translate: it’s now a site recruiting Japanese women for part-time ‘night work’ as entertainers in hostess clubs and that sort of thing.

Like The Spearhead, Dalrock suddenly ended under mysterious circumstances. So did The New Modern Man. His site has also been sold to an interesting new proprietor. HT to whoever sent me that, I can’t remember.

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Vaccine mandates intensify (Victoria, Australia)

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

What cities are there in Australia?
Source

One of the few positive outcomes of the Covid hysteria has been that the world has improved its previously shameful knowledge of Australian geography. Today we’re talking about Victoria and I expect you all to know what that means. It will be on the test.

While the Australian Prime Minister promised there would be no vaccine mandates, state premiers are free to do what they want. Victorian premier Dan Andrews wants to make certain ‘authorised workers’ (those allowed to go to work under current lockdown rules plus some others) get vaccinated. They have two weeks to get the first jab or they cannot legally work anymore.

What jobs does this mandate cover? A local newspaper provides a handy list, quoted below. Victorian or not, see if your job is here!

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Word from the Dark Side – second piano concerto, Spinal Tap, sick Brits, scary driving, skyscraper dodging and stealing the ex’s Nintendo Switch

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto. If you don’t like classical music, try listening to this piece twice (not in a row). If you still don’t like it, give up on classical music for a while.

In Britain, thousands more are dying than usual this time of year but about half of them don’t have Covid. I’ve not yet seen anything else like this from the mainstream media:

So if all these extra people are not dying from coronavirus, what is killing them?

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Class Struggle 2.0

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

Source

There’s an interesting class struggle going on in Australia, focused in Melbourne.

Tl;dr: Construction workers were required to get vaccinated and their union supported this government policy. Workers then attacked the union boss and the head office until they were chased off by riot police firing rubber bullets. The government then banned all construction work for two weeks as revenge against the unruly workers.

Full-on footage and further background here.

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Friday Finance: 10 steps to finding a GOOD financial advisor

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/saint-businessman-young-halo-above-head-sitting-chair-43771240.jpg

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.

Continued from last week:

I’ve hopefully convinced you that it is not a good idea to wander into the office of your nearest financial advisor, turn your brain off and do whatever they say, any more than you would tell a new barber, ‘Do whatever you like!’  But now you may instead be thinking, financial planners are scary!  They’ll take all my money!  I’d better stay as far away from them as possible!

Relax.  Some financial advisors are excellent, most are satisfactory and only a few are downright dodgy.  Here is a step-by-step guide for finding a good advisor and for getting the most from their services:

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Woke Inc. shelves multiculturalism

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

I was reading yet another Hate YT story and realized something interesting: we never hear the word ‘multiculturalism’ any more, even from the same elites who once pushed it with the same gay abandon they once spruiked the campus rape epidemic and Bruce Jenner.

I thought this might just be my impression, not reality, so I checked Google Trends to see how much the word is being searched worldwide.

This is what I found:

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Friday Finance: the trouble with advisors

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/disp/a627b919011463.562d37508fafa.jpg

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.

Common Problems With Financial Advisors

These are the common problems you are likely to encounter:

1.  Some advisors get a commission (basically a kickback) for referring investors to specific funds.  That was probably why the advisor I described above was recommending me inappropriate margin loans.  For example, if your advisor recommends that you put $100,000 into the high-fee, hypothetical Adamantine Investment Fund, he might score a 1% commission if you go ahead with it.  That’s $1,000.  Worse, this might be a trailing commission.  That means he gets 1% for every year that you’re in the fund.  Five years later you may have increased your AIF investment to $200,000 and that advisor from ages ago who you’ve totally forgotten about is still helping himself to $2,000 every year! 

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Researchers taking the piss

Posted on by Nikolai Vladivostok

There’s a bloke called Jeffrey Long who claims to have scientific evidence that near-death experiences prove some form of afterlife.

So what, you ask? Whatever you think about the soul, you probably assume that he’s just another crackpot.

In fact, Jeff is a medical doctor specializing in oncology who has compiled many accounts of near-death experiences. His research is dismissed by his colleagues and his career has no doubt been limited by his obsession.

Jeff reckons he’s the victim of bias because medical journals refuse to publish his research even though it meets their criteria in terms of methods and statistical significance.

He’s written a book on the subject and is big in mystical, new age circles but sources very close to him suggest that there’s more here than meet the eye.

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