Society's ChildS


Yellow Vest

Thousands protest in South Korea against government corruption despite lockdown orders

south korea lockdown
© REUTERS/Kim Hong-JiMembers of conservative civic groups march down a street during an anti-government protest, as concerns over a fresh wave of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases grow, in central Seoul, South Korea, August 15, 2020.
A spike in new coronavirus cases in South Korea has prompted authorities to reimpose tighter social distancing curbs in Seoul, but that didn't stop thousands of demonstrators from protesting against President Moon Jae-in's policies.

For the second day in a row in over four months, the country has reported a sudden jump in locally transmitted cases, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said.

The KCDC reported 166 new cases as of Friday, of which 155 were domestic, prompting authorities to re-introduce anti-virus measures as they worried about the spectre of a fresh wave of the disease.

Comment: See also:


Stock Down

Major UK retailer Debenhams on brink of collapse, blames lockdown

Debenhams
Debenhams has a commanding presence in most high streets across Britain
One of the UK's oldest department stores is on the verge of collapse as the coronavirus-induced recession continues to ravage the British economy.

According to Sky News, the 242-year old retailer has appointed advisory firm Hilco Capital, to help it unwind its operations if a sales offer falls through.

Debenhams has been in administration since April, when the coronavirus-related lockdown had a chilling effect on the UK's retail industry.

Comment: While the UK economy was slipping into a depression even before the lockdown, tyrannical government action has pushed it even closer to the brink of collapse:


NPC

1974 classic 'Blazing Saddles' gets slapped with 'social context' sticker to explain jokes to liberal babies

Blazing Saddles
© Warner Bros.Still from 'Blazing Saddles' Dir. Mel Brooks (1974)
Streaming service HBO Max has slapped an embarrassing disclaimer on the classic Mel Brooks comedy 'Blazing Saddles' to give it "proper social context," in another sign of the death of art at the hands of wokeness.

If you're looking to sit back and laugh at the irreverent 'Blazing Saddles' on HBO Max, you'll first have to sit through being talked to like a grade schooler.

Just as a trigger warning was added to 'Gone with the Wind' to warn viewers that a movie taking place during the American Civil War may not contain characters that fully live up to today's woke standards, 'Blazing Saddles' - a Western satire about a black sheriff (Cleavon Little) and an hard-drinking gunfighter (Gene Wilder) battling both racism and railroad thugs in a frontier town - has been stamped with a disclaimer.

The movie itself is a good hour and a half long, but plan on an extra three minutes so Turner Classic Movies host and University of Chicago cinema and media studies professor Jacqueline Stewart can explain to you how satire works.

Comment: See also: HBO Max has pulled 'Gone With the Wind' from its service in order to fight racism and, frankly my dear, I DO give a damn!


Arrow Up

Summer flu is now more deadly than Covid

man on tube
© Alex Davidson/Getty Images
We are, of course, in the middle of a deadly pandemic of a novel infectious disease. It's just that it is not, at present, killing remotely as many people in England and Wales as that boring old disease which no-one seems ever to worry about: the summer flu. Winter flu, yes - sometimes we worry about that overwhelming the NHS. We take the precaution of vaccination the elderly and other vulnerable groups. But the summer flu? It hardly registers.

Yet few seem to have noticed, while we fret about whether reopening schools, bars and so on will cause a second wave of Covid-19, that flu is killing five times as many people in England and Wales. In the week ending 31 July, these are the Office for National Statistics tallies for cause of death (as measured by mentions on death certificates): influenza and pneumonia, 928; Covid-19, 193. This is nothing new: more people have been dying of flu than Covid-19 since the middle of June.

flu deaths chart

Comment: In fact, they have already more or less stopped with the death tolls and now just publish climbing 'infection rates' (mainly due to the widespread testing now happening) since showing them together demonstrates this disease is not as deadly as claimed to be. See also:


Syringe

Survey suggests half of Russian doctors will refuse to take rapidly created Covid-19 vaccine - developer says fears unfounded

russian Sputnik coronavirus vaccine
© Sputnik / Vladimir PesnyaVaccine for coronavirus COVID-19 "Sputnik V"
Despite official claims that the world's first coronavirus vaccine is completely safe, 52 percent of Russian doctors who responded to an online survey indicated that they're not ready to take Sputnik V.

That has led to a sharp rebuke from the head of the team that developed the solution. Alexander Gintsburg, of the Gamaleya Institute, explained to the TASS news agency that doctors who refuse the vaccination must understand the consequences. According to Gintsburg, if medical professionals reject the vaccine, the only way for them to get antibodies is to "get severely sick, because the mild form does not give long-term protection."

"Catching a severe form of Covid-19 is likely to have consequences for the rest of one's life and, in a certain number of cases, as doctors know, death," Gintsburg added. "Therefore, there's a choice: refuse to be vaccinated and follow this path, or get the vaccine. "

Of the more than three thousand participants in the survey ... only 24.5 percent said they'd agree to vaccination, with many worried at the pace of development and the lack of data proving its efficacy. Meanwhile, 48 percent of respondents were wary that the vaccine had been created in such a short time, with only 20 percent saying they'd recommend the vaccination to patients, colleagues, and acquaintances. Of those surveyed, 66 percent said there was insufficient data on its effectiveness.


Comment: Legitimate concerns, however, how much of it comes from western propaganda?


Comment: See also:


Arrow Down

Here's Why the "Impossible" Economic Collapse Is Unavoidable

dinasaurs meteor
This is why denormalization is an extinction event for much of our high-cost, high-complexity, heavily regulated economy.

A collapse of major chunks of the economy is widely viewed as "impossible" because the federal government can borrow and spend unlimited amounts of money because the Federal Reserve can create unlimited amounts of money: the government borrows $1 trillion by selling $1 trillion in Treasury bonds, the Fed prints $1 trillion dollars to buy the bonds. Rinse and repeat to near-infinity.

With this cheery wind at their backs, conventional pundits are predicting super-rebounds in auto sales and other consumption as consumers weary of Covid-19 and anxious to blow their recent savings borrow and spend like no tomorrow.

As for the 30+ million unemployed--they don't matter. Conventional analysts write them off because they weren't big drivers of "growth" anyways -- they didn't have big, secure salaries and ample wealth/credit lines.

What this happy confidence in near-infinite money-printing and V-shaped spending orgies overlooks is what I've termed denormalization, an implosion of the Old Normal so complete that the expected minor adjustment to a New Normal is no longer possible.
The "New Normal" Is De-Normalization

Comment: See also:


V

Feds are treating BlueLeaks organization as 'a criminal hacker group,' documents show

BlueLeaks organization
The transparency activist organization Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) has been formally designated as a "criminal hacker group," following the publication of 296 gigabytes of sensitive law enforcement data earlier this summer, known colloquially as "BlueLeaks." The description comes from a bulletin circulated to fusion centers around the country in late June by the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The bulletin's language mirrors earlier US government descriptions of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and LulzSec.

"A criminal hacker group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDS) on 19 June 2020 conducted a hack-and-leak operation targeting federal, state, and local law enforcement databases, probably in support of or in response to nationwide protests stemming from the death of George Floyd," the bulletin reads. "DDS leaked ten years of data from 200 police departments, fusion centers, and other law enforcement training and support resources around the globe, according to initial media and DHS reporting. DDS previously conducted hack-and-leak activity against the Russian Government."

The document was obtained by Lucy Parsons Lab researcher Brian Waters through an Illinois Freedom of Information Act request with the Cook County Sheriff's Office.

Stormtrooper

Americans see pressure, rather than genuine concern, as big factor in company statements about racism

woke capitalism
Companies from Silicon Valley to Wall Street have publicly denounced racism since the protests following the killing of George Floyd. But Americans are divided on whether it's important for firms to weigh in on political and social issues. And they are more likely to believe pressure from others - more than genuine concern for Black people - has driven recent statements about race, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Overall, 52% of U.S. adults say it is very or somewhat important that companies and organizations make public statements about political or social issues, while a similar share (48%) say this is not too or not at all important, according to the July 13-19 survey.

Americans' views vary substantially by race and ethnicity. While most Black (75%), Asian (70%) and Hispanic adults (66%) say it is at least somewhat important that companies and organizations release statements about political or social issues, this share falls to 42% among white adults.

Bullseye

Millennials annoyed by Nick Cave's attack on cancel culture are really just still angry with mum and dad

Nick Cave
© REUTERS/Thomas PeterNick Cave
The singer penned a letter branding cancel culture "mercy's antithesis", prompting the typical social media howling from my hideously woke generation who are abusing the only power they really have.

Nick Cave is the latest celeb to come out against cancel culture with a typically well written criticism of one of the 21st century's more ugly pastimes. The Aussie singer was answering letters from fans on his Red Right Hand Files website when the topic arose. Responding to a couple from Florence, Italy, the Bad Seeds frontman took down cancel culture, branding it a "bad religion run amuck."

Cave wrote: "As far as I can see, cancel culture is mercy's antithesis. Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. Its once honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way now embodies all the worst aspects that religion has to offer (and none of the beauty) — moral certainty and self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption. It has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck."


Comment: The basis for reimagining society need first to be founded on a well informed world-view about history, cultural development and disintegration, human nature, health, pathology, economics, science, ideology, religion, and so on. There are many factors that relate to the structure of our social structures, but political correctness is a faulty way because it doesn't seek to understand them. It doesn't pursue depth of meaning or truth, instead it relies on human reactions and impressions based on miniscule information to determine what it 'right' or 'wrong'. Its attempts at restructuring society toward equality have only been honorable in the most shallow version of the word. PC culture has the ability to spread quickly precisely because it does not take the time to understand the world or specific situations from multiple angles. It's one-sided nature blocks access toward charity and discernment while reinforcing its merciless moral certainty.


Comment: Perhaps one of the basic things millennials have lacked is the personal growth that comes by experiencing risks, learning boundaries, and discovering higher values independent from the herd. To be fair, this doesn't just relate to millennials or Generation Z. Earlier generations clearly lack these things too, and the snowball effect is clear. Today, we see so many seeming adults who refuse to grow up through their adaptation of their children's culture, and their refusal to take responsibility for their own lives by depending on 'the authorities' to tell them what to think and what to do. Older societies have their issues for their time, but at least they weren't so incredibly centered around the severe lack of actual adults to handle these problems.


Eye 2

Dance, monkey, dance! Nearly half a million Brits in France scramble to get home as UK announces quarantine restrictions

train covid
Boris Johnson's UK government is adding France to its quarantine list as its number of coronavirus continues to rise sharply.
Hundreds of thousands of British tourists face a scramble to return from France after Boris Johnson's UK government announced that holidaymakers returning from there would have to quarantine for 14 days as of this weekend.

The UK on Thursday said France, along with five other countries including the Netherlands and Malta, would be removed from the "green list" of countries which are exempt from quarantine restrictions as the country recorded a sharp uptick in coronavirus infections.

"Data shows we need to remove France, the Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, Turks & Caicos & Aruba from our list of #coronavirus Travel Corridors to keep infection rates DOWN," the UK's Transport Minister Grant Shapps said on Twitter.

Comment: See also: