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Monday, November 18, 2024

2024-11-18

***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:

  • Elevated uncertainty causing officials to urge caution on cuts
  • Policymakers still showing confidence over inflation path
...... Many have said they believe the neutral rate — the level where rates neither fuel nor dampen economic growth — has likely risen since the pandemic. But none has expressed confidence over where it lies.

“Importantly, uncertainty about the neutral rate has also risen, perhaps because the structural changes in the economy are relatively recent and will take time to fully assess,” Schmid’s counterpart in Dallas, Lorie Logan, said in separate remarks at the same conference.

The uncertainty is weighing heavily on Fed officials, because overshooting the neutral level would risk reigniting inflation. That will likely make them proceed with greater caution and possibly introduce pauses into their rate-cutting cycle.

Logan said “widely consulted models” put the neutral federal funds rate anywhere from 2.74% to 4.6%.




Expectations for another era of Trumponomics have boosted US yields and the dollar, while downside risks have increased in the Euro area due to the collapse of the German coalition government. Further divergence looks likely.


“Private credit has been a relatively new competitor for more traditional leveraged finance,” Altman said. “Whenever there’s competition, there’s usually an impact on prices or, in this case, spreads.”

The average spread was 2.55 percentage points on Wednesday, but going back to 1986, that level has averaged closer to about 5.2 percentage points, according to Bloomberg index data. Current levels should be closer to historic levels, Altman told Bloomberg.

Investors don’t seem too worried now, but they probably should be, Altman said. Bankruptcy filings and leveraged loan defaults have climbed since 2022, and leverage levels are relatively high, Altman wrote in an analysis in August.







Bubble Fare:




Quotes of the Week:

US October producer price inflation is due. These numbers better reflect corporate pricing power than does the consumer price data. The tone should be consistent with a December rate cut—in this situation, the Federal Reserve does not want rising real rates, and inaction would raise real rates over the course of this year.
Yesterday’s US consumer price inflation data remains in thrall to the fantasy owners’ equivalent rent (at over a quarter of the index and rising over 5% a year, this is a price no one has ever actually paid). Middle-income homeowners’ true cost of living inflation has been below 2% y/y for six months. 



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Purpose and Profits?

You might know, by now, of my views on ESG, which I have described as an empty acronym, born in sanctimony, nurtured in hypocrisy and sold with sophistry.  ..........





Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are expected to reach records highs this year, with "no clear signs" of a peak despite a growth in clean energy, .......







...... Almost half of humanity lives below $6.85 per day. This population does not consume goods and services at a rate exceeding Earth’s capacity. Yet here we sit, on the wrong side of six of the nine planetary boundaries identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

How did we get here? Via the economic activity of the other half of humanity. The planet, and all its inhabitants, desperately need this population to slow down.  ..............


The green investing revolution never stood a chance in the US once ensnared by the culture wars, but that wasn’t the only cause of death

......... Supporters of the concept were already disillusioned that ESG had become little more than a marketing wheeze, and several big fund managers, including WisdomTree and Invesco, have faced fines in the US for “greenwashing” (claiming their products were greener than they really were). In France, BlackRock is under fire over allegations that 18 of its funds sold as sustainable are in fact investing in fossil fuels. ...........

 



Much has been written about the denial, by many if not most of the world’s people, that climate collapse is accelerating, and that it will irrevocably precipitate or intensify and quicken the collapse of our entire global human civilization, with catastrophic consequences possibly including the extinction of most or all life on the planet, including human life.

But the inevitability of climate collapse is just one obvious example of humans refusing to believe what they don’t want to believe.

Here’s a summary of why I think this is so prevalent:
  1. Our behaviours (what we do) are strictly the product of (i) our biological conditioning (what our ‘instincts’ tell us to do), (ii) our cultural conditioning (others’ behaviours — what they say and do), and (iii) the circumstances of the moment. ‘We’ have no say in any of it.
  2. Our beliefs (what we think) are the product of the above three conditioning factors, plus (iv) our rationalization (how we ‘make sense’ of things, and what we want to, and refuse to, believe, and (v) our own behaviours, which need to be justified and rationalized.
...............


“What a diff’rence a day made”.

.................................................................... 
......................... We are in the ENDGAME now.

I want to be REALLY CLEAR about this. It’s TOO LATE to do anything about the Climate Crisis without attempting GEOENGINEERING the Climate System. Probably using SOx aerosols to increase the planetary ALBEDO to reflect more sunlight away from the planet.

Simplistic but this is the basic idea. Put SOx aerosols in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.

James Hansen, and the team of climate scientists who work with him, are calling for a HUGE build out of nuclear power plants AND a global program to “turn the sky WHITE” with sulfate particulates. In conjunction with a CRASH effort to slash Global CO2 emissions as quickly as possible.....................

Last weeks election means we are effectively going to do nothing to SLOW the Climate Disaster down. It probably means +4°C by 2050 and a -80% decline in agricultural outputs.

Collapse is going to play out now over the next 25 years. ...............





U.S. B.S.:


Biden’s legacy is genocide, war, and nuclear brinkmanship. That’s all anyone should talk about when this psychopath finally dies. Anything positive he may have accomplished in his political career is a drop in the ocean compared to the significance of these mass-scale abuses.

Biden spent his entire career promoting war and militarism at every opportunity, and then spent the twilight years of his time in Washington choosing to continue supplying an active genocide that is fully dependent on US-supplied arms.

He refused off-ramp after off-ramp to the horrific war in Ukraine that has burned through a generation of men in that country, which he knowingly provoked by amassing a military proxy threat on Russia’s border in ways the US would never tolerate being amassed on its own border. In the early weeks of the conflict Biden and his fellow empire managers sabotaged peace talks to keep the war going for as long as possible with the goal of bleeding Moscow, and at one point his own intelligence agencies reportedly assessed that the probability of a nuclear war erupting on this front was as high as 50–50.

Coin toss odds on nuclear war. To call this a crime against humanity would be a massive understatement.

Biden has been facilitating Israeli atrocities in the middle east with US military expansionism in the region and bombing operations in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. He will spend his lame duck months backing Israel’s scorched earth demolition of southern Lebanon.

This is who Biden is. It is who he has always been. It is true that his brain has begun to rot away like just like his conscience has rotted, but in his lucid moments he adamantly defends his administration’s decisions as the only correct course of action, and it aligns perfectly with his past. To know this, one need only to look at the pivotal role he played in pushing the Iraq invasion, or his extremist rhetoric about how “If there were not an Israel we’d have to invent one.”

This is the legacy that Democrats were forced to spend the last election cycle pretending is great and awesome. It’s no wonder they lost. So now, as a parting gift from Joe Biden, Americans and the world get another four years of Donald Trump.

That’s the story of Joe Biden. That’s the whole entire thing. Anything on top of that is irrelevant narrative fluff.


***** Heying: Reason for Optimism
Even in a Hall of Mirrors

Three presidential elections in a row, with three rounds of outrage and disbelief.

Three presidential elections in a row, and three rounds of excitement and relief.

We are in a hall of mirrors. We can be sitting right next to someone who has been shown entirely differently “facts” about what is true—facts which demonstrate how decrepit Joe Biden is, how sexist Donald Trump is, how incompetent Kamala Harris is.

I don’t believe the middle of those three statements, and I do believe the others. Many people believe the opposite of what I do. None of us are inherently fools or fascists for believing what we do.

Science is about figuring out what is true. We scientists don’t always get there, and we won’t necessarily know when we do. We make mistakes—lots of them—and it is incumbent upon us to correct those mistakes when we discover them. Science is a messy, non-linear process, and scientists are only human. We all have capacity to discern fact from fiction, though, to think scientifically. One easy step to take is to distrust any who tell you that they are the voice of science. Science is not something to be followed, or to be believed in. Science is something that you do.

One thing is certain: (almost) nothing is certain.

Fact-checkers have become popular in recent years as arbiters of truth, as have their mouthpieces, the mainstream media. They are not. They get a lot of things very, very wrong. The problem is not so much that they get things wrong, though, but the certainty and authority with which they do it. We were assured that SARS-CoV2 didn’t come from a lab. (Oh, but it did.) The mRNA Covid shots are safe and effective. (No, they’re not.) Donald Trump said that there were some very fine people among the white supremacists in Charlottesville. (He did not.)

Our sense-making apparatus is upside down and inside out, and even most of the scientists don’t seem to know what is going on. ....

Meanwhile, the warmongering neocons whom Democrats like me used to disdain, are being welcomed in to the Democratic Party.

That sentence may be difficult to parse. To be clear: I still disdain the neocons. And I am no longer a Democrat.

Any party that embraces the neocons is not the party for me. Establishment politicians are running to the Democratic party, because that is their only remaining safe harbor. That should tell us all something about what is happening over in Republican land. It’s chaos. Many of us hope and believe that the chaos will result in far better things in the future. Chaos is inherently unpredictable, though ....................................


or, very predictable:
Clean sweep for Israel: Marco Rubio, Elise Stefanik, Mike Waltz, Brian Hook.

........... As I said the other day, I suspect Pompeo and Haley — who were part of Trump con 1.0 — had their names floated to make the other warmongers Trump was set to name look more palatable.

And, as I’ve argued for years, Trump is the opposable thumb of the establishment. ............



Donald Trump has named Republican congressman Mike Waltz as his next national security advisor, a position that was held by ultrahawk John Bolton in the last Trump administration.

Like Bolton, Waltz is a warmongering freak. Journalist Michael Tracey has been filling up his Twitter page since the announcement with examples of Waltz’s insane hawkishness, including his support for letting Ukraine use US weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, criticizing Biden for not escalating aggressively enough in Ukraine, advocating bombing Iran, opposing the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and naming Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and Venezuela as “on the march” against the United States toward global conflict. The mainstream press are calling Waltz a “China hawk”, but from the look of things he’s a war-horny hawk toward all the official enemies of the United States. .............



The way raw video evidence debunked the “Amsterdam pogrom” narrative in real time in full view of the entire world is exactly why Israel hates journalists. It’s why it won’t let the western press visit Gaza, and it’s why it murders Palestinian journalists at every opportunity.
❖
Trump’s “America First” cabinet is being packed full of swamp monsters who want to pour American money into helping Israel destroy the middle east, pour American money into the unwinnable proxy war in Ukraine, and prepare American troops to fight a war with China to defend Taiwan. 
❖
 I’m already getting Trump supporters all over my replies telling me that the hawkish inclinations I’m seeing from the incoming administration aren’t what they look like. They did this throughout his entire first term. Four fucking years of morons telling me the insane acts of warmongering I was witnessing were actually fine and good, or even brilliant strategic maneuvers against the deep state warmongers. Really not looking forward to another four years of this shit. ..............



Geopolitical Fare:

The liberal world order was always a myth


U.N. Special Rapporteur Albanese’s report is an an urgent appeal for a full arms embargo and sanctions on Israel until the genocide of Palestinians is halted.






Trump Is Not the "End of Liberalism", Ending the War in Ukraine, European Industry Getting Ruined By US Diktaks, Germany's Failing Economic Model , When Airlines Vanish

.................... I take issue with Fukuyama’s contention that American voters rejected liberalism. Donald Trump is nothing if not a 1990s Clinton liberal. Elon Musk, a man who played an outsized role in Trump’s victory, is also your standard-fare liberal who was, until recently, himself a Democrat. Two key players on Trump’s transition team, RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, are also both ex-Democrats and both are political liberals.

One of the bigger themes of this Substack is how the term “liberal democracy” is used and abused, and constantly changed and updated. This constant morphing leaves those who fall outside of its present and temporary definition relegated to the status of “illberals”, if not fascists. ...............


President Biden's decision to allow Ukraine to fire American missiles deep into Russian territory risks plunging the world into crisis in the finals months of his administration. 






Europe turns away from America

........................................ Which reminds me: I suppose Foucault would have asked why Europeans were so quick to accept many of these evidently silly ideas and norms, apart from the convenience of doing so, and the work involved in finding alternatives. I think there are a number of different issues here, and a number of different reasons why Europeans, quite voluntarily, adopt US norms and ways of looking at the world, in spite of the obvious irrelevance of many of these norms and the failure, in practice, of attempts to apply them.

One, simply, is power worship. The impression, again heavily fortified by American cultural output, is of a powerful, determined and ruthless nation able to act decisively on the world stage.  ...................

In its purest form this attitude did not last very long, given the failure in Afghanistan and the disaster in Iraq, but it remained, and remains, highly influential. It is at the root of the disastrous underestimation in Europe of Russian military power, and the belief that Russia, like all weak states, can just be kicked around without consequences. It is also at the root of unreasoning hatred of Iran, and fear that a rising China will do to the United States what that country has sought to do to the rest of the world. The realisation that the United States is not, in fact, a “hegemon” or an “Empire,” and has been misguided to behave as if it were, is only slowly dawning now on European elites: I return to this point below. ................

The Myth works backwards, of course. So insistent is the stress on omnipotence, omniscience and omnicompetence, and so complete is the exclusion of the interests and opinions of other nations, that we are inevitably required to conclude that Washington had decided everything in every crisis. So when the war in Ukraine started and it was expected that Russia would be defeated and Putin overthrown within days, that was assumed to be part of the plan all along. When that didn’t happen and sanctions were imposed to strangle the Russian economy, that was assumed to be the plan all along. When the Ukrainian forces were wiped put and had to be rebuilt with NATO stocks, the plan all along was assumed to be more order for defence manufacturers, although in fact much of the equipment sent was obsolescent or surplus and would not be replaced. Then when the war went into its second and third years it was assumed that the plan all along had been for a sustained war exhausting Russia militarily. Now that it is clear that the West, rather than Russia, will be left exhausted and militarily weak, someone is no doubt trying to fit that into the long-term plan, ignoring the fact that “Washington “ and “long-term” don’t really belong  in the same sentence together. .........................


They don't make Colour Revolutions like they used to



.......... The Sahel, a vast region spanning parts of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, is known for its economic hardship and violence, but the new governments in these nations are taking major steps towards breaking free from foreign influence and asserting local sovereignty . There’s a lot of hope. As Stanley Kwabla Arku, a Ghanaian journalist with Pan African Television, writes:

The Sahel’s recent shifts have ignited a movement against foreign military involvement, particularly French influence, which many local voices say has fueled conflict and stymied economic progress. ..........

A big reason why is that the US and France are helping to drive the violence, including using Ukraine, much the same way they do with Israel, to destabilize nations and regions that threaten Western capital. .........


Critics of foreign aid are often quick to point out the faults of recipient countries. This column looks at the motives of the donor countries themselves. Examining the flow of foreign aid following major discoveries of natural resources, the authors find that aid flows tend to increase following a discovery despite the recipient country becoming wealthier. The finding suggests that donor countries are not entirely altruistic, but prioritise access to valuable natural resources and their strategic interests above recipient need.




Sci Fare:


COVID-19 was arguably the worst public health disaster in history, and as more and more are now realizing, most of that could have been prevented if the medical industry had been less greedy throughout the pandemic and not put profits before people. Because of this, the unconditional trust the industry made enormous investments to create and has relied upon for decades has been shattered (e.g., a large JAMA study of 443,445 American adults found that in April 2020, 71.5% of them trusted doctors and hospitals while in January 2024, only 40.1% did)

Over the last month, I have received a large number of requests to highlight some of the egregious conduct by our healthcare authorities throughout the pandemic. At the time, it did not feel like the correct time to publish it, but now it does (e.g., something can be done about it).

In this article, I would like to focus on a few critical areas that need to exposed as we begin exploring the topic of COVID accountability ...................................

Regulatory Corruption
Throughout COVID-19 we’ve seen numerous red flags about the danger and ineffectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines. Yet, regardless of the data or how much the vaccines fail to live up to their promises, the FDA and CDC keep on approving and then mandating the vaccines while insisting they are safe and effective. This has made many suspect those agencies are corrupt, particularly since:

•The government accountability office interviewed employees at these agencies who stated that political interference caused their agencies to adopt policies that went against scientific evidence during COVID-19.

•Leading scientists in the FDA’s vaccine approval division resigned as a result of being pressured by the Biden administration to approve an unnecessary COVID-19 booster. ...................


Canary In a (Post) Covid World: Money, Fear and Power



Other Fare:


If, at the moment, you find yourself looking around for guidance about, I don’t know, the nature of reality and how easy it is to manufacture it, you could do a lot worse than turning to Philip K. Dick. .......................

How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, published in 1978 but begun around the time of Richard Nixon’s resignation, has achieved cult status for its exploration of manufactured realities and institutional power. In the book, Dick examines how media systems can create “pseudo-worlds” delivered directly into people’s minds. His analysis of how “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups” strikes an eerily familiar chord in our hyper-digital age. .................


Defining and allocating legal rights, and, by implication, assigning legal personhood, is one way to protect nonhuman entities (such as animals, plants, and ecosystems) and the interests of future people. This paper aims to clarify some basic issues underlying legal and legal policy debates about such protections ........


Their body, your choice
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Sunday, November 10, 2024

2024-11-10

***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:

RBC: How far is the BoC behind the curve?

.......... 
Desynchronization of macro and policy cycle = rate cuts need to speed up. Let's assume the BoC is right and inflation risks are balanced (downside risks more pronounced in our opinion). With low inflation that means growth and output gap assessments take on added weight in their policy decisions. Their historical compass (output gap) is saying to speed up rate reductions. While the BoC may ultimately react to "large" data surprises in determining the size of the move each meeting, we think the bar has been set. Data needs to come in hotter than their forecasts to justify a downshift to 25bp cuts. 

A tall order for growth to absorb excess supply. Disinflation risks won’t dissipate until excess supply is absorbed, which requires a period of sustained above trend growth (they have told us this is their desire). The BoC estimates the output gap at -1.25% (range of 0.75% - 1.75%), which means that GDP needs to exceed potential by an equivalent amount over one or half the amount over two years to absorb excess supply. How is that going to happen given the growth track record the last 2 years and a policy setting that is still restrictive? The BoC even noted in the MPR that they did not expect slack to be absorbed until H2-2025. Their above consensus near-term projection simply would keep the level of excess supply unchanged.

We always argued the BoC would be as late to easing as they were to tightening. While they don't need to cut as quickly as they hiked (75bp or 100bp clips) given the asymmetry in high vs low inflation costs, 25bp seems woefully insufficient. This framework underscores our current forecasts and reinforces what the Fed does (small or large cumulative cuts) is largely irrelevant to Canada's policy cycle


Republican clean sweep makes it significantly easier to implement full policy agenda. Risks very firmly tilted to the downside for US and global economic growth and to the upside for US inflation.


One corporate CEO welcomed the Republican's victory as "an opportunity for consolidation."


Many people now live in homes and rely on infrastructure that are owned by pension funds, insurance companies, and banks




Bubble Vid Fare:





Charts:
1:
4: 
6: 
7: 


 ...



(not just) for the ESG crowd:




..................................................... As this recent article in BioScience a lengthy list of authors say, 

“It is our moral duty and that of our institutions to alert humanity to the growing threats that we face as clearly as possible and to show leadership in addressing them.”

Absolutely.



“Everybody knows the boat is leaking/Everybody knows the captain lied”
– Leonard Cohen, “Everybody Knows”
When the polls closed on Tuesday, November 5th, I was sound asleep, like a baby rocking gently in his cradle, lost to the frenzied rants or joyful shouting of the different political claques.  Even though I missed the results of what the mass media had been telling us was the most important election in our lifetimes, I was happily oblivious to their cant.  I remember hearing that nonsense many times before.

I gave up on my country’s electoral system more than fifty years ago.  Every presidential election is a contest between two sides of the ruling monied elite, chosen to represent their interests.  It is corrupt beyond repair and was so even then. Do most people have a clue that their country is owned and run by a small group of the super-rich and ten or so financial institutions, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, etc., the big banks and financial interests that in 1947 formed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to spearhead the U.S. warfare state around the world in support of its economy that is reliant on endless war?

The electorate continually puts its hope in the performers that the spectacle’s producers put up to front for their interests, failing to grasp that the rulers’ interests are not theirs.  Arguing and anguishing over certain policy differences between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, they fail to see that both exist to serve global capital, not regular people, that exchanging presidents is a counterfeiter’s con-game with the voters the scammers’ marks.

Trump’s current victory is an example of that, as was Biden’s in 2020.  If Harris had won, it would have proven the same.  They are two sides of one coin.  That the system is rigged by the oligarchs should be obvious but isn’t.  Or maybe it is obvious but people secretly harbor a perverse liking for it.  Stranger things are true, as on personal levels people embrace the symptoms of their neuroses because the symptoms are their disguised solutions, their ways of staying stuck because change is hard and frightening and requires admitting repressed realities. .........

.................................... But Baker goes on to castigate Trump as a criminal, a liar, a fraud, a conspiracy theorist, etc. while the joyful Harris just miscalculated and underestimated popular discontent.  This is the usual Times’ schtick.  Turn to the New York Post for the obverse and have a chuckle at the absurd game the media play on the public.

Baker’s headline tells us that Trump’s win signals that the U.S. is now a different kind of country because so many people are fed up with how it’s being run.  Different from 2016 when Trump won?

If only it were a different country, but it isn’t.  The same elite money forces run the show.  Elections don’t change that.  People continue to be suckers ..........



As the FT put it: “In the end, it wasn’t even close. A presidential election long forecast to dance on a knife’s edge very quickly turned out to be a rout for Donald Trump.” ...........



Over ninety-nine percent of economists did not predict the 2008 financial crisis.

The vast majority of economists were pro-globalization, by which I mean pro offshoring and outsourcing. They said it would be good for America, they were wrong.

China is predicted to wind up with over 50% of the world’s industry by 2030. Forget all the bullshit about great power competition. It’s over. There may be a war, but if there is one the West will either lose or the world will be destroyed in a nuclear exchange.

Back in the 90s an economist called Brockway liked to say “Economists are bad for your health.”

(If you like the writing here, well, support it if you can. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. Please Subscribe or Donate.)

Let’s bring this back to the election. I thought that abortion would be the election defining issue. Stupid of me. It was inflation, which given how much I write about it, I should have expected. .........

Growth numbers are based entirely on nominal growth minus the inflation rate, as are real wage numbers.

I would bet that the US economy has been contracting since 2008, but since inflation is understated, it isn’t visible.

I would also bet that median welfare for Americans has been declining since somewhere between 1968 and 1979, though average might have been increasing till 2008 because of how much money was being shoveled to the rich and wealthy.

We live in a pretend world, and economists are the chief pretenders, the sycophants telling the Emperor how wonderful his new clothes are.

To riff on Galbraith, economists exist to make astrologers look good.



.............. Americans who have not yet fallen into precarity or the economic abyss can not and will not accept that our system is completely rotten and we need to change course and leadership.

........... Trump is at least a wild card which presents some chance of positive change, but the odds of radically negative change are much higher.

Regardless, the status-quo has been thoroughly rejected by the majority of the American public.



This might annoy some of you — it is my hasty first thought.

The Democrats have been thoroughly defeated.  Deservedly so.  They no longer relate to, or reflect, the American working class.  Without building such a relationship they cannot regain power.  Nor should they. ..........................

History suggests that there will always be an elite able and willing to extract excessively from society at large.  That extraction once came mainly through force.  The elite was filled with monarchical, militaristic, baronial, and religious thugs who thought nothing of applying force to tread down on average folk and seize an outsized share of social production for themselves.

Democracy was supposed to mitigate this tendency.  Since industrialization our modern thugs have been the capitalists who own property sufficient to generate unequal shares of wealth for themselves.

............. It was this educated elite that generated the ideas forming the foundation of neoliberalism.  That elite was generously funded by the wealthy class. ................... Notably this educated elite is self-perpetuating.  Each sector of that elite governs itself. 

............... Since its modern emergence this elite has grown in power.  It has grown in wealth.  It has grown apart from the society within which it prospers  It now participates fully in elite extraction.  It has joined forces with the wealthy class. ...........................

History will not judge this generation kindly.


"It's as hard as you'll ever get."

........ No one expected Trump 45. As it happened, everyone felt like they were stepping off into an unknown—a negative space, in which anything could happen. Everyone expected Trump 47, and everyone seemed to know exactly what they were getting. What we are getting.

What are we getting, actually? Forget everything. Forget the whole story. The whole mythos of Trump. Actually, nothing ever happens. Here’s what we’re actually getting. TLDR: if you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it. It’s as hard as you’ll ever get. .....................

Well—you can forget about all that nonsense. Why?

Because—for example—well before the 72 hours is out, Trump has (informed sources tell us) selected one Brian Hook to lead his State Department transition team. Hook is a former aide of Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State. These people are, of course, neoconservatives—the descendants of the old American Trotskyists. (It’s been a long time since we had a choice besides American Trotskyists vs. American Stalinists.)

You thought there was a way to vote out the neoconservatives? Lol. At least you can vote them in, and the progressives out. You did that. Amazing job! You’re done. Don’t worry, kid. Your balls won’t stay blue forever. .................

This is what the government is. This is what it does. This is what your candidate won the election of. It’s a nice fantasy that it could be something other than what it is. But ................

Once this administration—this strange centaur, with a red head and a blue body—exists, it is one body. Once Trump puts people in charge of the State Department, however much they struggle to get the State Department to do what Trump wants—they own the State Department. They are there to use it, not to hurt it. Heck—even if Elon Musk gets his people in at State, they are red human heads breathing blue horse blood pumped by a blue horse heart through blue horse lungs. Their jobs own them. ........................


“If voting could ever really change anything, it’d be illegal.”
- Thorne, Land of the Blind (2006)
After months of handwringing and mud-slinging and fear-mongering, the votes have finally been cast and the outcome has been decided: the Deep State has won. .........



.............. I am unfortunately a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why “can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic shit those people will do if they get control of the government?” would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post-George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch for change from all this (or even burn-it-all-down), it didn’t fall flat. ............


The last four years were the darkest in U.S. history: A vicious clampdown on freedom at home; brutal wars abroad. Will Trump fight the Beltway militarists, or make a deal with them?


The 2024 presidential election results show a crushing defeat and repudiation of liberal globalist ideology. We are witnessing a social and political earthquake as the Republicans look set to control Congress, as well as the White House.

As a bonus, an analysis of voting data of the past four elections reveals that Biden’s vote count in 2020 is beyond a doubt highly suspicious (see chart below), having garnered an extra 15 million votes that can’t be explained. ....................

Russia/Ukraine is the ultimate test of Trump’s sincerity. If he truly wants to break the back of the Deep State then he must agree to Moscow’s sensible terms — no NATO membership for Ukraine, and the right to self-determination for regions that want to join Russia. ............

Let’s take a brief look at how Biden’s brutal and disastrous rule began, and what events fueled the anger of the American people. ...............................................


Kunstler: Aborted
Be careful what you wish for

............ The New York Times diminished itself. It drove itself crazy with narratives — just as a crazy person with disordered thoughts can’t discern what’s real and what’s not. What they need is a serious mental health check. The time for incessant lying, hoaxing, and performative hysteria is over. On Thursday, in a three-minute speech, the President-elect set out a clear list of measures to reconstruct a national consensus based on reality. It includes firing a lot of people in the agencies, dis-embedding all the inspector-generals from the departments they oversee, establishing a “truth and reconciliation commission” to declassify and publish documents “related to alleged deep state activities, including spying, censorship, and corruption,” and finding out who exactly at the CIA / FBI / DHS / and other places has been leaking fables and falsehoods to the news media. In other words, clear away a shit-ton of untruth that burdens the consciousness of country. 

Though the statement omitted to say so directly, it’s very likely that a number of public officials will find themselves before grand juries in the years ahead. If you haven’t figured it out already, you’ll learn that the term “misinformation” was just the gas in the gaslight used to confound the country about what has really been at stake — which is your personal liberty in what is supposed to be a free country. The Democratic Party and the Deep State blob really did try to steal that from you.

As they stole the 2020 election — which is probably one of the things to be revealed in the process. Look at this bar graph. Note how many millions more votes were cast in the 2020 elections than in the two previous and now in the 2024 contest. How did that happen? Where did that surplus supply come from? The Covid-19 scam provided the cover for a profligate mail-in ballot operation. They deluged the country with paper. Mark Zuckerberg provided $450-million through his cut-out charities to hire thousands of party activists to harvest and fill-out fraudulent ballots, and stuff them in drop-boxes by the hundredweight, with special attention to the crucial precincts in swing states — and that’s what landed the basement-cringing candidate, “Joe Biden,” in the White House.


It was that simple, and that much in-your-face, and for four years the official organs of the news swatted the truth away claiming they were “false, baseless, conspiracy theories” — and half the country was credulous enough to believe that. Or mentally ill, not able to tell fantasy from reality, especially in the newsrooms. Even more shamefully, this half of the country was led by the better-educated, credentialed, managerial class of citizens, who, amazingly, managed to turn intelligence into a new kind of personal liability. (The simplest explanation for that astounding failure is that people who consider themselves “experts” eagerly believe other experts and credentialed authorities, making them easiest to dupe. That’s why the faculty lounges are full of Jacobins.)

The winning side in this contest didn’t vote against Kamala Harris so much as they voted against the Democratic Party, the Party of Chaos, of BLM riots, of drag queens in the school library, of men in the women’s swim lane (and locker room), of forced vaccinations (your bodily autonomy, sister?), of locking up grandmothers who walked through the Capitol rotunda, of state-driven censorship, of malicious political prosecutions, of ruinous proxy war, of flooding the country with criminal alien mutts, of Mao Zedong style erasing of history, of FISA court surveillance .........................


The American people made their stand and won. Now comes the hard part...

................ As I put it during our interview, if I were Trump, I would drum up a Nuremberg-like process in a very public and explicit way and begin an open season on a number of unsolved mysteries of the last six decades beginning with the following:
  • JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations
  • 9/11
  • Global War on Terror
  • Russiagate
  • C19 pandemic
  • Ukraine war
  • 2020 elections
  • WEF agenda
  • Epstein and P Diddy lists
  • Lahaina
  • North Carolina, etc.
At the very minimum, some of these issues must come under public Truth and Reconciliation inquiries. These should distill the truth with such clarity that it can become part of America’s and the world’s history curriculum for generations to come. They should also shine the sunlight at the epicenter of corruption and uncover its ultimate beneficiaries with names and mugshots.

Such a process would not only have full support of the majority of American people: it would captivate the attention and support of the whole world ...........

Only hours after this interview was published I came across a recorded statement by Trump, indicating that he does indeed intend to go on the offensive. The statement (video clip is in this tweet) is a glove thrown in the face of the deep state swamp:
First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the President's authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left's political enemies, which they're doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible. Third, we will totally reform FISA courts which are so corrupt that the judges seemingly do not care when they are lied to in warrant applications. So many judges have seen so many applications that they know were wrong, or at least they must have known. They do nothing about it, they're lied to. Fourth, to expose the hoaxes and abuses of power that have been tearing our country apart, we will establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and corruption, and there are plenty of them. Fifth, we will launch a major crackdown on government leakers who collude with the fake news to deliberately weave false narratives and to subvert our government and our democracy. When possible, we will press criminal charges. Sixth, we will make every Inspector General's Office independent and physically separated from the departments they oversee so they do not become the protectors of the Deep State. Seventh, I will ask Congress to establish an independent auditing system to continually monitor our intelligence agencies to ensure they are not spying on our citizens or running disinformation campaigns against the American people, or that they are not spying on someone's campaign like they spied on my campaign. Eighth, we will continue the effort launched by the Trump administration to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington Swamp. Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, as many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out. And I mean immediately out of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America, and they really do love America. Ninth, I will work to ban federal bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they deal with and that they regulate. So they deal with these companies and they regulate these companies and then they want to take jobs from these companies. Doesn't work that way—such a public display cannot go on and it's taking place all the time, like with Big Pharma. Finally, I will push a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress. This is how I will shatter the deep state and restore government that is controlled by the people and for the people. Thank you very much.
This is music - symphony - to my ears. But wait, it gets better. Mel and I also spoke about the critical importance of free speech and the media.

Taming the corporate media
Anti-Trump hysteria induced by the enemies of the people media could be one way the new administration could be sabotaged. To avoid this, they should break up the media monopoly by making it easier for journalists and media entrepreneurs to set up independent operations and compete for viewership/readership by creating compelling, quality content. Again, it’s clear that Trump and his team have been thinking along the same lines. Trump issued the following statement (the 6-min. video clip is at this link):
If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple, just like dominoes, one by one - they’ll go down. That’s why today I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left wing censorship regime and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans. And “reclaim” isa very important word in this case, because they’ve taken it away. In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of deep state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people. They have collaborated to suppress vital information on everything, from elections to public health. The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed and it must happen immediately and here’s my plan. First, within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any Federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business or person to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban Federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis-, or dis-information. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship, directly or indirectly, whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health, Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are. Second, I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is absolutely destructive and terrible and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified. These include possible violations of Federal Civil Rights law, Campaign Finance laws, Federal Election law, Securities law and Anti-Trust laws, the Hatch Act, and a host of other potential civil, criminal, regulatory and constitutional offences. To assist in these efforts, I am urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters, and we have to do this right now, to the Biden Administration, the Biden Campaign and every Silicon Valley tech giant, ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship. Third, upon my inauguration as president I will ask Congress to send the Bill to my desk, revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business. From now on, digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness and non-discrimination. We should require these platforms to increase their efforts to take down unlawful contents such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech. Fourth, we need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called myths and disinformation. The Federal Government should immediately stop funding all nonprofits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project. If any U.S. universities are discovered to have engaged in censorship activities, or election interference in the past, such as flagging social media content for removal or blacklisting, those universities should lose federal research dollars and federal student loan support for a period of five years and maybe more. We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end -run around the Constitution and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. In other words, deprive them of their vote. And once you lose those elections, and once you lose your borders like we have, you no longer have a country. Furthermore, to confront the problems of major platforms being infiltrated by legions of former deep staters and intelligence officials, there should be a seven year cooling off period before any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DOD is allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast quantities of U.S. user data. Fifth, the time has finally come for Congress to pass a digital bill of rights. This should include a right to digital due process. In other words, Government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information request such as the FBI was sending to Twitter. Furthermore, when users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadow-banned, or otherwise restricted, no matter what name they use, they should have the right to be informed that it’s happening, the right to a specific explanation of the reason why, and a right to a timely appeal. In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt out of content moderation and curation entirely, and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose. The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America and for the survival of Western Civilization itself. When I’m president, this this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left. By restoring free speech we’ll begin to reclaim our democracy and save our nation. Thank you and God bless America.
This is a very strong, important and enormously encouraging statement. It is in stark contrast with John Kerry’s authoritarian musings about doing away with the First Amendment. ............



The Democratic Party has lost control of both the White House and the Senate. As of this writing it is still unclear which party will secure control of the House of Representatives. Turns out campaigning on the promise of continuing a genocide while courting endorsements from war criminals like Dick Cheney is not a great way to get progressives to vote for you. 

One interesting point is that Donald Trump appears to have taken the battleground state of Michigan, where Kamala Harris was soundly rejected by the large Arab American population of Dearborn despite their voting overwhelmingly for Biden in 2020. Back in August, Harris famously shushed Muslim anti-genocide protesters at a campaign rally in Michigan by admonishing them with the words “I’m speaking”.

Well, who’s speaking now?

To be clear, this is not a good result. A good result was not possible this election. The warmongering Zionist genocide monster lost, which means the other warmongering Zionist genocide monster won. ....................

Democrats exaggerate how destructive Trump is relative to their own bloodthirsty psychopath candidates. While we can expect Trump to inflict tyranny and abuse upon Americans, it will be nothing compared to the tyranny and abuse he’s going to inflict on people in other countries, and it will be nothing compared to the tyranny and abuse his predecessor has been inflicting on people in other countries. ..............



Virulent Iran hawk Brian Hook has reportedly been chosen by Donald Trump to help staff the State Department of the incoming administration, just in case you were still holding out hope that this time might be different and Trump really would end the wars and fight the deep state.

Readers might remember Hook as the swamp creature who in 2017 was seen in a leaked State Department memo lecturing Rex Tillerson on the US government’s policy of using human rights as a cynical tool to undermine enemies and reinforce alliances. This is done, Hook explained, by ignoring human rights abuses when they are perpetrated by US allies while emphasizing them at every opportunity in the nations of enemy governments in order to “impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.” ..........

I’m already getting people telling me to “give Trump a chance” and stop criticizing him before he’s in office when I point out developments like this. Give Trump a chance? He had four years. He was the president for four fucking years. Trump showed us who he is: a murderous warmongering empire lackey just like his predecessors. ..............



So hey, can Democrats finally start opposing genocide now?

Just kidding. They won’t.

❖

Democrats are sitting on a mountain of hundreds of thousands of human corpses they helped kill by mass military slaughter in the last four years, weeping and lamenting that now bad things are going to start happening. 

❖

Democrats are shrieking so loud today because they know they’re wrong. They know their party ran a dogshit candidate. They know it was crazy to expect the left support the party that’s committing a live-streamed genocide. 

It’s not anger. 

It’s not fear. 

It’s cognitive dissonance. 

❖

Democrats will spend the next four years viciously attacking Trump. So will I. But while Democrats will attack Trump because of the few ways in which he is different from themselves, I will be attacking him because of the many ways in which he is the same as the Democrats. 

Both parties are in full alignment when it comes to the worst evils of the US empire. I and others like me will be focusing there, while the Democrats pour all their energy into pretending to be a real opposition party and exaggerating the differences between themselves and Trump. ..............


The dustbin of history awaits thousands of race-baiting professional panic-mongers whose craven dishonesty gave Donald Trump a popular-vote mandate

As election results poured in last night, revealing the incredible fact of eight years and millions of hours of hysterical propaganda somehow achieving negative results, America’s opinion-making class continued broadcasting from a magic place far up its own backside, a land no message can reach. They never learn ............


*** Sardonicky: Trump 2.0....

... brought to you, once again, by the Democratic Party. which spent billions of dollars doingits damnedest to lose this intra-oligarchic contest. Let us count just a few of the ways:

--Setting up Kamala Harris to take the fall. Her failure to win even a single primary vote in the 2020 contest made her a shoo-in for defeat, which is what Democrats wanted all along. Their whole purpose is to fund-raise by blaming everyone but themselves. You almost have to feel sorry for Kamala at this point. I don't imagine that she'll follow in the footsteps of her predecessors, the Clintons and the Obamas, cashing in with Netflix deals, speaking tours and self-glorifying charitable foundations..

--Their implicit goal of achieving lifetime status as martyred elite losers was cemented in the final weeks of the campaign. To ensure that Harris would lose, Bill Clinton told Muslim voters that Israel had a right to commit genocide ............

..................... The way forward, if we are to survive this dark age, is to band together in acts of mutual aid, both large and small, both loud and quiet. Any resistance movement must be from the bottom up and remain as far as possible away from the Democratic Party and its various veal pen think tanks and its corporate media partners. 



Geopolitical Fare:


So from January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will inherit the on-going genocide that the US government has been party to in the Middle East. He will then have no cover and will be judged accordingly. What follows are a few thoughts that I had when I watched the unfolding disaster for the Democrats and the amazing victory that Trump has recorded. It was obviously a Hobson’s Choice facing the US voters (from an outside perspective), which also tells us something about the way the US society has evolved. Both candidates were in my view unelectable. But the voters didn’t agree with me. And, one candidate was much smarter that the other and better understood the plight the American voters are in after several decades of neoliberalism. Spare the thought.

I am on the public record as saying that if I was an American voter I would have voted for Jill Stein because, despite some misgivings I have about her narratives (particularly about macroeconomics), she has been consistently green and consistently against the way the Israelis have treated the Palestinians.

Those two issues are of utmost importance in my World View.

I noted that many claimed a vote for her would effectively be a vote for Trump.

Which implies that some people should not have agency to express their voting preference, which I would find offensive if I was an American.

The Democrats who tried to vilify Jill Stein on that basis were really saying that voters should not have a choice and should just vote for Harris no matter what they thought.

That was the line that Bernie Sanders took telling people in his last Op Ed that Kamala might be bad on Gaza but Trump would be worse.

Well, Trump hasn’t been president or vice-president while the US government has been sending massive quantities of lethal weapons and support to Israel, which has enabled the genocide to proceed.

Only one Party has done that so far in this current period. ...........


Patrick Lawrence: Notes of a Non-Voter

............. I read this stuff, nonstop since Trump defeated Kamala Harris, and every column inch of it confirms my conviction the Democrats deserved not merely to have lost, but to have suffered an unequivocal trounce.

.............................. Four more years of Donald Trump in the White House is a high price to pay to humiliate the liberal authoritarians.

............................... There are three very big things Trump can do on the foreign side that could stand as significant turns in U.S. policy. Actually two, and one thing that will stand as significant because Trump will do nothing. 

 I have no faith in Trump’s declaration that he will end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. That is mere campaign-trail bluster, more or less harmless. But I have no doubt his intent remains as stated: He has said, humanely enough, he wants to see people stop killing themselves. When Trump said just before the election that Liz Cheney ought to stand “with nine gun barrels shooting at her,” the Democrats feigned more shock and horror: He is so violent, so misogynistic. Either the Dems and their running dogs in media are stupid or cynical or both, and I would say both. Trump was merely suggesting a hardened warmonger, one of the neocons’ worst, would think differently if she were on a front line. It is a fair point.

Until recently I would have said Trump stood little chance of delivering on his end-the-war promise: The Deep State would surely sink his boat on this question. But the talk in Washington and the reporting in the media has changed. We—you and I, “the public”—are being drip-drip-drip prepared for a sort of undeclared capitulation in the form of a signaled openness to a negotiated settlement. Russia’s advances are now reported in detail. So are the Kiev regime’s weaknesses—poorly trained troops, not enough of them, low morale, exhaustion, desertions. More Western weapons will not do it, we can now read. 

A Russian commentator remarked recently that what is needed now is “a Minsk III,” meaning a return to the terms Russia negotiated with Germany and France in late–2014 and again in early–2015. Nothing could be more sensible.

...................... As to Israel, Trump has made his condemnable sympathy for the Israeli cause very plain. So he will change nothing in the matter of material, diplomatic and political support for the Zionist regime

........................ As to the extravagant tariff regime Trump proposes, I am with Richard Wolff, the noted economist: It is simply too crazy, too stupid and too ruinous of the American economy and American lives for Trump to go through with this threat



The only thing I like about Trump is exactly what so many empire managers hate about him: he gives the game away. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs.

Trump is the opposite of Obama, who was very skillful at putting a pretty face on the evil empire. Trump puts a very ugly face on a very ugly thing. He is a much more honest face to have on the empire. A crude, stupid plutocrat who is owned by other plutocrats is the perfect representative of that tyrannical power structure.

❖

The propaganda machine has been spinning its head off trying to frame soccer brawls in Amsterdam as a horrifying “pogrom” against Jewish people because the side instigating the violence were supporters of team Maccabi Tel Aviv who flew in from Israel.

Video evidence shows far right Israeli hooligans terrorizing the streets of Amsterdam, chanting “Fuck the Arabs”, starting fights, beating people, tearing down Palestinian flags, attacking a cab driver, and singing “Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs! Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!”

In the face of all this evidence of atrocious behavior by Israeli soccer fans, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Antisemitic Attacks Prompt Emergency Flights for Israeli Soccer Fans”. The Wall Street Journal ran with “Antisemitic Attacks in Amsterdam Prompt Tight Security at Jewish Sites”. “Pogroms have returned to Europe, and the ‘anti-racist’ Left are silent,” says The Telegraph.

Meanwhile the Daily Mail sports section ran with a headline more in line with what people actually saw: “Israeli football hooligans tear down Palestine flags in Amsterdam as taxi drivers ‘fight back’ in night of chaos ahead of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s visit to Ajax”.

Leaders of western nations like the US, UK, Canada and France joined the Dutch king in framing these soccer brawls and hooliganism as a historic mass-scale hate crime against Jews, while Israeli officials have been melodramatically shrieking like their hair is on fire.

These exhausting victim-LARPing freaks. Stop playing sports with Israel. Stop holding sporting events which could lead to the deranged members of a genocidal apartheid state showing up in your community stirring up violence and hate so they can cry victim and say you holocausted them. 

❖

Another thing that sucks about the fake “antisemitism” crisis that the western political-media class are pretending to believe in is that it will probably become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which creates real hatred of Jewish people. 

You can’t keep telling everyone over and over and over again that Jews and Israel are one and the same and that any criticism of one is always necessarily an attack on the other while the state of Israel is murdering children by the tens of thousands without contributing to unfair prejudice against Jewish people everywhere. Israel is exacerbating this effect by insisting its actions represent all Jews and are done in defense of Judaism while committing genocidal atrocities under a Star of David flag. 

If you understand the truth that modern Israel is a settler-colonialist project of the western empire which uses the Jewish religion as an excuse to inflict violence and tyranny in a crucial geostrategic region, then you understand that there’s no real connection between modern Israel and the Jews you encounter in your community. Sure a majority of western Jews buy into the empire’s lies and support Israel, but a majority of the westerners of all faiths buy into the empire’s lies about its wars and official enemies and all its other propaganda too. This is just what it looks like when you live in a highly propagandized society which is structured to psychologically manipulate people into consenting to nonstop military violence. ..........


Did an unprovoked antisemitic “pogrom” really occur in Amsterdam? The evidence tells a different story.

According to media reports, an antisemitic pogrom occurred in Amsterdam earlier this week, as Israeli football fans were hunted and beaten in the streets for no reason other than being Jewish. Western leaders — from Biden to von der Leyen to Trudeau — all rushed to express their support, suggesting that Europe is headed straight for a repeat of the Nazi horrors of the 1930s and 40s.

This would be terrifying indeed — if only it were true. ..........


Travelling fans verbally abuse locals and tear down Palestine flags before fights break out with Dutch youth


A case for African states to embrace the deliberate pursuit of modernity and structural socio-economic change (and learn from China's experience while at it)



Sci Fare:

New research indicates that people who contracted COVID-19 early in the pandemic faced a significantly elevated risk of heart attack, stroke, and death for up to three years post-infection.



Yves here. While seeing some big breaks with former code of omerta about Covid side effects is welcome, this piece is still frustrating. It still recites the tired and almost certainly false trope that Covid vaccine side effects are rare. ...........


Dark matter is possibly surrounded by dense clouds of neutrinos. Here’s why it is both good and bad news for us





Other Fare:


............... I have been asking a number of online friends and colleagues a question inspired by a website that asked a similar question. My version of the question is:

What are five things (characteristics, qualities, customs) that you think most differentiate the people and culture of your (birth, current or adopted) country from those of any other country?
An American photographer’s reply on the above-noted website prompted my curiosity about this question. His answer for Americans was:
  1. a lack of curiosity (eg they tend to not travel outside the ‘west’, sometimes leading to xenophobia),
  2. a cult of individuality (eg my right not to get vaccinated trumps my fellow citizens’ right to protection against pandemic disease)
  3. anti-intellectualism
  4. a seeming preference for quantity over quality (more and bigger = better)
  5. enduring cultural diversity
My tentative answer to this question for Canadians is:
  1. a propensity to define ourselves as a nation by how we’re different from Americans (often: humbler, smarter, politer, better informed, meeker)
  2. a kind of disingenuous politeness (not as bad as “sorry not sorry”, but inclined to be cursory); there’s even a joke about the “Canadian sorry”, an example of which is that when someone carelessly bumps into us, we apologize for being in their way
  3. anxiety about being sucked into American culture (and even political union); Americans own most Canadian corporations, land, resources, and energy rights, and US media represent about 80% of our media ‘watching time’
  4. a lack of critical thinking capacity, and a lack of imagination (we’re like the US in this, I think, but unlike most of the rest of the world)
  5. conflict aversion, and a persistent willingness to compromise and seek peaceful resolution of issues
All of this is conditioned behaviour, and since we’re not all conditioned the same way, these “five things” lists are inevitably generalizations. What I like about them, though, is that they force me to recognize exactly how our conditioning compels our behaviour. That’s useful for understanding that behaviour, rather than ascribing it to exceptionalist “attitudes” or national “character flaws”. ................

Canadians’ conflict aversion, I think, stems from the realization, learned the hard way as a vast and vulnerable country at the mercy of more powerful countries and the vagaries of harsh weather, that in almost every conflict, there are no winners, only losers, and an appreciation that on most subjects there are no simple and right answers, that “everyone has a piece of the truth”. And our lack of critical thinking and imaginative capacity, I think, stems from the fact we no longer much practice doing these things (in the workplace, in our education system, or in our leisure time) — rigid work processes that offer employees no leeway, insistence that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers that will affect your school grades if you challenge them, and games with strict constraints and narrow options, condition us to blandly accept and do what we’re told, and preclude us from imagining any other possible ways to do things. ................

Everything around us is falling apart. That is no one’s “fault”. Complex systems and civilizations inevitably collapse once they cease to be sustainable and responsive to their members. That’s where we are. The signs are everywhere. I despair to think how that collapse is going to unfold if we don’t show more signs of calm, of reason, and of a genuine desire to understand and deal with the crises of the moment, rather than succumbing to entrained infantile ranting, fear-mongering, hate-mongering, simplistic good vs evil thinking, and knee-jerk violence. But if that’s how we’re going to behave, I want to understand that, too. And I kind of understand it. We can’t help ourselves. But it’s going to make our future much harder to navigate, and to survive.



Fun Fare:




Pics of the Week:





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