I See Dead People

they don't know they're dead

Mark Carney gave a speech in Davos, that fortress of democratic pluralism where hotel rooms inside the security zone cost thousands of dollars a night and no one with an expense account has to be lonely because the massive security forces don’t try to interfere with all the sex trafficking, which is very democratic. Anyway, the speech was stunning and brave, and everybody clapped a lot.

Someone put the word “flexes” next to the word “Canada,” apparently not intending to cause laughter, but yes: Mark Carney flexed and warned and puffed himself up like a man who’d just eaten the wrong part of the fugu.

You should watch it. Don’t try to eat or drink during the speech, because you’ll choke, and push any breakable household goods away from the reach of what will soon be your flailing arms, but you should watch him perform this extraordinary set of stranded symbols. The mismatch between message and messenger is…very special.

I was physically paralyzed as an effect of hearing this sentence from this face for a full ten seconds, and then I spasmed. It’s like watching Erich Honecker stand up to the East German regime. “We cannot tolerate misogyny, warns Jack the Ripper.”

Carney hinted broadly that the rules are breaking down in international relationships…

…which for the first time in a long time are being reshaped by mere power, a rare thing on the global stage, because there’s meanness and bullying and a rejection of friendly norms and restraint from…someone very bad, not that he was naming names, and so Canada is turning to new partners, extending the hand of friendship to nations and leaders that still care about rules and values and democracy.

The central banker who was selected as his country’s head of government before he’d ever stood for election to any office anywhere ever, the prime minister of a country where the government had just been rebuked by its courts for faking a national security emergency so it could suspend the rule of law and crush dissent, gave a real tubthumper about democracy and the rule of law.

The total absence of connection between “things being said” and “things being done” sets a record, here. But a lot of records were set this week, as Davos also displayed an illuminated sign on a peak above the town:

No…kinos? No, there’s a little - across the middle of the o, which turns it into a g, so NO KINGS. And the British and the Spanish and the Canadians and what have you proudly stood tall beneath that slogan, because unlike Americans they would never tolerate having a oh wait.

Repellent greaseball Gavin Newsom was also in Davos to preen and publicly masturbate to his own empty symbols.

I’m at a loss, and you don’t want me to once again catalog California’s metastasizing list of obvious failures. But the failures don’t stop the preening. A bunch of word-performance merely happens, whenever a stage is set for word-performance, and physical reality isn’t germane to the discussion. They have a big annual conference so important lunatics can gather in one place to perform psychosis at each other. A dying order chants more insistently: “the brains hooked into that model will essentially have their wiring undone, because this is just what happens when a neural network is forced to ingest an information diet consisting solely of incoherent contradictions.”

Scott Bessent just described Gavin Newsom as “Patrick Bateman meets Sparkle Beach Ken,” and the important part there is that one’s a fiction and one’s a toy. When world leaders and leader-fakers gather, what they’re doing is fictional playtime. None of it means anything at all, like government is the Truman Show. When the movie sucks this hard, people eventually leave the theater.

ADDED LATER:

The balls this sentence takes: