Many of you reading this are ready for winter, both literally and figuratively. Your firewood is stacked and your kindling is split. Your barn is stacked full of hay. Your larder is crammed full of food. Your fuel tanks are topped off. And your home armory is "dialed-in", with its walls comfortably stacked with ammo cans. But some of you reading this are not nearly so well prepared. Whether by lack of resolve or lack of resources, you aren't ready for the manifold challenges of the 21st Century.

Winter is coming. The Old Farmer's Almanac predicts that the winter of 2022-2023 will be harsh, for most of the country. And in Western Europe, the winter will surely be an uncomfortable one, since the Russians have embargoed natural gas.

Far worse than the predicted La Niña winter in North America, we are also entering what I term a Societal Winter: An era of rancorous discontent between political factions here in the United States that is replete with iciness, and dismissiveness, by The Powers That Be. With divisive "Woke" rhetoric and plenty of finger-pointing, people are feeling a lot less "United" these days. From my vantage point here in the rural Northern Rockies, it appeared that immediately after Joe Biden and his activist cabinet took office in D.C., the Mainstream Media (MSM) cranked the Acrimony knob all the way up to "11." (For those not familiar, the 11 is a reference to the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.)

All signs now point to the advent of a deep and long Societal Winter.

This is a key moment. The pressure is on President Putin to respond to the transformation of a limited proxy affair into overt NATO war is increasing.

On Thursday of last week, there gathered in the Ramstein NATO air base in Germany a flotilla of European, British and American officials -- ostensibly to lay claim to a PR success for the role that western weapons have played in Ukraine's war against Russia. Yet, the meeting had the second, deeper objective of assessing the ability of Kiev to continue sustained warfare, which is to say, not only briefly to take territory, but to keep it.

This latter aspect has taken on added urgency as there is a little more than one month left until winter turns the Ukrainian terrain on the plains into mud, leaving tanks and heavy vehicles floundering. Furthermore, Ukraine's public finances are in freefall, with external aid amounting to only $1.5 billion -- leaving a hole of some $7 billion per month that is being filled by Ukraine printing fresh money.

The CDC has been hiding the Social Security Administration death master file. I got it from a whistleblower. This shows deaths are taking 5 months from the jab to happen. This is why it's hard to see.

The key point is this:

The UK data shows statistical proof of causality of deaths (p<.001): the vaccine doses track with the excess deaths 23 weeks later. Dose dependency is key to showing causality. If no one can explain this, the precautionary principle of medicine requires any ethical society to halt the vaccines now.

Many people assumed the vaccine kills you quickly (in the first two weeks) because that's when people notice the association and report it to VAERS. This is still true; it does kill some people quickly: half of the deaths reported in VAERS are in the first few weeks.

But the key words are "reported in VAERS." It turns out that if we don't have that restriction but are just wondering when most of the deaths after COVID vaccination happen, the answer is different.

Thanks to a helper who works at HHS, we can now clearly see that most of the deaths from the vaccine are happening an average of 5 months from the last dose. That is for the second dose; it may be getting shorter the more shots you get but there are arguments both ways (since there can be survivor bias). Using data from the UK, we can see more clearly that the delay time is around 23 weeks (so a bit more than 5 weeks). We'll dive into that shortly.

A plea for more interesting alt-realities than the Moon Landing Hoax, Flat Earth, and No Virus.

The post-truth world, in which our collective perception of reality has been smashed into fragments like a shattered funhouse mirror, contains a plethora of alternative reality structures. I get frustrated with some of the more popular species, not because their champions are aggressive assholes (looking at you, no virusers¹), and not even because their pet narratives rest on misconceptions of well-understood scientific principles.

No, my beef is that so many of them are boring. They lack imagination.

Take the Moon Landing Hoax people. Their basic thing is that the Apollo missions never happened. Mankind never set foot on the lunar regolith; it was just actors hopping around on Stanley Kubrick's sound stage. The Saturn V rockets were simply elaborate set pieces, built at vast trouble and expense to provide verisimilitude for Kubrick's cinematic masterpiece. I guess when you're trying to fake something on the scale of Apollo, it makes sense to go to the trouble of spending all the time and effort necessary to design, test, and build the fantastically complicated and expensive multi-stage rockets, orbiters, and landers necessary for the enterprise, without actually going. Sort of like Borges' 1:1 scale map in The Exactitude of Science: if your fake Moon landing is so close to the real thing that you actually go to the Moon, no one will ever know the difference and you'll fool them all! The hoax was necessary because actually going to the Moon is, you see, impossible: the Van Allen radiation belts would have fried the cells of the astronauts². Besides which, obviously if we'd actually gone to the Moon, we'd still be there ... right? To a generation raised on CGI all but indistinguishable from real life, it's fairly easy to believe that simulating the Apollo voyages would have been trivially easy in comparison to actually undertaking the journey (and never mind that that level of FX sophistication didn't exist in the 60s).

A ballooning number of hiring and tenure decisions require candidates to express written fealty to political doctrines

In 2021, the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) School of Medicine — ranked fourth in the country for primary care — released a 24-page "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Strategic Action Plan," listing dozens of "tactics" for advancing "diversity and racial equity" over the ensuing half-decade. One of those tactics reads: "Include a section in promotion packages where faculty members report on the ways they are contributing to improving DEI, anti-racism and social justice." The plan promises to "reinforce the importance of these efforts by establishing clear consequences and influences on promotion packages."

OHSU's policy represents the latest stage in the institutional entrenchment of DEI programming. Universities have long required diversity statements for faculty hiring — short essays outlining one's contributions to DEI and future plans for advancing DEI. Since it began almost a decade ago, the policy has been criticized as a thinly veiled ideological litmus test. Whether you see it as one largely depends on whether you think DEI is simply a set of corporate "best practices" like any other, or constitutes a rigid set of political and social views. In any event, the diversity statements and criteria have only expanded, and are now commonly required for promotion, tenure, and faculty evaluation.

At least eight people have been killed and four others are missing after 16 inches of rain hit the central Italian region of Marche in just two hours, causing catastrophic floods.

Local authorities said they did not expect such a sudden 'water bomb', as around 16 inches of rain fell within two hours on Thursday night, inundating the streets of several towns in the Ancona and Pesaro-Urbino provinces.

'It was like an earthquake,' Ludovico Caverni, the mayor of the town of Serra Sant'Abbondio, told RAI state radio.

Big Pharma and Big Tobacco are helping market high-potency, psychosis-inducing THC products as your mother's 'medical marijuana.'

For 30 years, Dr. Libby Stuyt, a recently retired addiction psychiatrist in Pueblo, Colorado, treated patients with severe drug dependency. Typically, that meant alcohol, heroin, and methamphetamines. But about five years ago, she began to see something new.

"I started seeing people with the worst psychosis symptoms that I have ever seen," she told me. "And the worst delusions I have ever seen."

These cases were even more acute than what she'd seen from psychotic patients on meth. Some of the delusions were accompanied by "severe violence." But these patients were coming up positive only for cannabis.

Western "half-wits" from "stupid think tanks" are leading their countries down the road of nuclear armageddon with their hybrid war against Moscow, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. Endlessly funneling weapons and support to Ukraine while pretending not to be directly involved in the conflict will not work, added the deputy chair of the Russian Security Council.

The "security guarantees" proposal unveiled by Kiev on Tuesday was "really a prologue to the Third World War," said Medvedev, calling it a "hysterical appeal" to Western countries engaged in a proxy war against Russia.

If the West continues its "unrestrained pumping of the Kiev regime with the most dangerous types of weapons," Russia's military campaign will move to the next level, where "visible boundaries and potential predictability of actions by the parties to the conflict" will be erased and the conflict will take on a life of its own, as wars always do, Medvedev argued.

Overcoming a reluctance to share their strategy, the Ukrainians were able to use U.S. resources to identify key Russian targets.

Senior Ukrainian officials stepped up intelligence sharing with their American counterparts over the summer as they began to plan the counteroffensive that allowed them to make dramatic gains in the northeast in recent days, a shift that allowed the United States to provide better and more relevant information about Russian weaknesses, according to American officials.

Throughout the war, the United States has provided Ukraine with information on command posts, ammunition depots and other key nodes in the Russian military lines. Such real-time intelligence has allowed the Ukrainians — who U.S. officials acknowledge have played the decisive role in planning and execution — to target Russian forces, kill senior generals and force ammunition supplies to be moved farther from the Russian front lines.

Revelation that heir to throne is routinely sent confidential papers comes after three-year freedom of information battle.

Prince Charles has been receiving confidential cabinet papers for decades, giving him access to the inner workings of British government, according to a Whitehall manual released after a three-year freedom of information battle.

The heir to the throne, who has previously been criticised for "meddling" in politics, is sent all cabinet memoranda, alongside the Queen and ministers in charge of departments, including secret proposals for new legislation and other discussion documents that have only been released to the public after 30 years.