The diesel price increase may have been the trigger, but, to interpret the Gilets Jaunes first and foremost as a protest against climate policy is to miss the point. The real target was economic distress, inequality and President Macron.

The Gilets Jaunes had to be portrayed as “against climate policy” because that would successfully demonize them in the eyes of the left. It worked!

By the way, this mostly only happened in the Anglophone press and not nearly as much in the French press. There, it’d be harder to lie successfully. Having to cross a language barrier enabled this disinformation to prosper quite well and now most Anglophone liberals believe the Gilets Jaunes were just a bunch of racist hicks who wanted the planet to burn.

In reality they were for climate policy that forced the rich to also make sacrifices, and outside of that they supported the reduction of inequality in society generally.

I wonder how much of the same sort of distortion and deceit is done when covering movements and events that occur in languages I can’t read and understand? I bet a whole damn lot.

When lost in lockdown, let your senses save you.

This is propaganda preparing the way for the next inevitable wave of lockdown in many places. It made the plutes too much money not to keep repeating it. Why mess with success? Throughout the pandemic, The Guardian has been an an enormous lockdown narrative backer, never failing to perfectly hit all the proper lib/plute-supporting notes.

I wonder how long this will keep working? I don’t mean lockdowns. I mean, how long will the libs really go for this, how many years will the propaganda narrative function? Will they really believe this is the way life has to be in a decade?

I don’t know. It seems so but I wish I didn’t believe this. Anyway, get locked down, peasant! A billionaire needs more cash.

Watch how great Naomi Watts is here. Anyone who thinks that level of performance does not take extreme skill is just delusional. Try having a regular person do that and it’d be absurd.

Christ she’s brilliant there. I like seeing it unedited.

In 1992 with the world watching, Paralympic archer Antonio Rebollo shot the arrow of a lifetime to light the Olympic cauldron in Barcelona to begin the Summer Games. He had extracted a promise from organizers to allow him a second shot if he missed. It was not necessary.

Hey, remember when we weren’t concerned with everything being “completely safe?” We were having a lot more fun then.

Notice that he shot a big fucking flaming arrow over the heads of a few thousand spectators. “Completely safe” wasn’t something we used to give a crap about, and it was better.

When did the so-called liberals become the ones hating sex, hating socializing, despising space exploration, detesting going outside, hating the Olympics, most standing firmly against the majority of their former strongly-held values of freedom and personal choice?

What the hell happened there?

What a clever and fun book cover:

I might have to pop that book into an e-reader, see what song it sings.

Boris Johnson is taking another huge gamble by lifting lockdowns in England.

Hey, libs, haven’t y’all gotten the news yet that there are a variety of safe and effective vaccines that are widely available? Have you heard? It’s pretty cool.

You should totally look into it.

The choice is ours – how opening up will turn us into moralists of daily life.

This article is just garbage. It’s full of unevidenced assertions, false choices, and an utter ignorance of how people actually behave. But it’s pretty typical of the “experts” we’ve relied on during this pandemic. However, a commenter said it better than I could about why this whole method of thinking is flawed and plainly disastrous:

The pandemic goalposts have been strapped onto an SR-71A Blackbird and it has taken off, jetting away at top speed. Remember “flattening the curve?” Or in the UK, “Protect the NHS?” Remember “when the vaccines are here, we’ll be able to get back to normal?”

I do. Not many people seem to recall those things, but I do.

What exactly is the end goal, the desired state of the lockdown lifers? I don’t think they have one. I think lockdown is now the goal.