I hear the train a comin', it's rolling round the bend

Well I know I had it coming, I know I can't be free

In La-La-Land, there are no bubbles, just enthusiasm for new technologies with limitless potential to reap billions in new profits. It's not a bubble, we're assured, it's simply strong fundamentals: sales are soaring, profit margins are fattening, and there's no end in sight.

In March, 2002, two years after the dot-com bubble had topped out, Scott McNealy, co-founder and CEO of dot-com darling Sun Microsystems, wrote a now-famous encapsulation of the difference between strong fundamentals and a bubble:

"At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?"

The chart of the dot-com bubble's euphoric ascent and eventual collapse is instructive: note how strong fundamentals eventually returned to the pre-La-La-Land level, wiping out all the wealth created by the bubble. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/la-la-land-fairy-tale-soft-landing

My feeling as a member of the Great Unemployed living on a dime thinner every day is Die Wende in November. The turning ironically is not the Wall coming down but the Wall coming up. The choice in November is which evil is worse. No white hats. Not even shades of gray. I cannot vote for any of the above and boycott the nonsense of parsing evils. The NWO is here now. It ain’t going away. After 2020 a precedent was set that the sheep shall be fleeced and eaten or salvaged for spare parts. Transhumanism, Technocracy, Totalitarianism as if seen from the eyes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who reminds us that: “The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depths of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognise the significant in the factual is wisdom.”

The drums beat louder a savage sound that only vaccines and imprisonment can save mankind from invisible evil. Covid vaccination continues. Vaccine deaths and injures are also continuing but also blamed on anything else. 2020 cemented the legitimacy of Sanitary Tyranny. 2024/2025 seems to my eyes to suggest this solution is agreeable to many voters. So choose your poison, Mr. Warp Speed redux or DEI Sanitary Salvation.

https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/anti-lockdown-theory-in-defence-of-giorgio-agamben/

With a new virus sweeping the world, the media in panic mode, and states reacting with draconian lockdowns, the coordinates of the social world seem shaken to their core. Yet some social theorists have written works foreshadowing this crisis, as well as responding to it. In the first of an occasional series, Ceasefire’s theory columnist Andy McLaverty-Robinson examines theorists who are particularly relevant to the current crisis. He begins by returning to Giorgio Agamben, focusing on his analysis of the crisis.

The storm has finally broken. The creeping police-state of the last two decades has been extended into an unprecedented system of social control. On the pretext of public health measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic, a swathe of ordinary social activities are criminalised. Scenes which would not look out-of-place in dystopian fiction are unfolding daily: police harassing sunbathers and mountain-climbers, chasing away cricketers, bawling at people on beaches from naval ships. Horizontal social relationships, unmediated by technology or the state, are effectively banned. The ground is taken out from under social movements. This could be the beginning of a new order: the introduction of Chinese-style capitalism, in Britain and across the world.

Today, most people are reacting emotionally, not theoretically. The accepted wisdom that socialising kills is repeated as a mantra by people with no knowledge of the science behind it. An appeal to apolitical science, along with media-fuelled public panic, provide the motivations to meet a healthcare problem with military and policing measures. Yet scientists are actually divided on the pandemic. Scientific knowledge is a product of evidence. It only becomes in any way reliable after extensive experiments have been conducted and cross-checked. In other words, evidence emerging within the first months of a new disease is not reliable and changes constantly. Doctors have told us that early evidence is unreliable, that even simple DIY masks are probably effective, and that testing is more effective than lockdowns. As late as January 2020, scientific consensus was that lockdowns don’t work at all.

This orthodoxy changed overnight, based mainly on data from China – data which has probably been manipulated by a Chinese government obsessed with image management. Chinese dissidents believe the government covered-up and bungled the crisis, with one calling it a 90% manmade disaster and blaming the government’s obsession with image. People in Hong Kong overwhelmingly saw the Wuhan lockdown as being for show and bound to fail. Yet the Chinese model has been exported via the WHO to the west and south. Alternatives – ranging from mass testing to wearing masks, from antivirals to improving the water supply in poor countries – are either ignored or tagged onto the lockdown hysteria. We can also predict that many people will die due to the psychological and economic impacts of lockdowns. And we also know that lockdowns and distancing are unrealistic for the poor, homeless, prisoners and detainees.

It can thus be concluded that the pandemic tells us little about the response. Lockdowns are not preferred because they are proven effective. Lockdowns are preferred because they fit into existing trends towards securitisation, rely on resources governments already have (police, not doctors), and extend state power. They also fit in well with current fashions for algorithmic modelling and the use of feedback and nudges on an aggregate level (instead of relating to people on an individual level). This is where theory comes in.

There have already been a great many pieces by radical writers on the situation. Some of these simply fall in line with the authoritarian orthodoxy, or supplement it with concerns about structural causes, uneven impacts, or protection of the worse-off. Others advance important criticisms that the approach is based on moralities of shame, not medicine, that the dominant framing is wrong, that it involves a state health system trying to control people’s bodies, that its impact varies with life circumstances, that the crisis is caused the capitalist disturbance of the substance of nature and life, that lockdowns are simulations of insurrection and urban warfare and attacks on personal relationships, or criticise the use of punishment instead of social measures.