Regular Fare:
Coronavirus Medical Bills: America’s Next Financial
Crisis?
Once again the BLS reports tame inflation and this
time with negative revisions:
The Cautionary Tale of Undocumented Insanity
A crucial “core” rate, services less rent, declined even further during January. Dropping sharply to 1.05% year-over-year, down from an already historically low 1.42% for December, we’ve almost never witnessed this low level of consumer price gains in the service sector; this counts as the 1st percentile for data dating back to 1984.On “stimulus” and “overheating”: If not now, then when?
… I’ve already commented on this a bit here and here and here, noting in
particular that neither Summers nor Blanchard, in assessing the optimal size of
the “stimulus,” takes into account that federal aid for state and local
governments is the entire ballgame determining whether or not we end up having
another austerity-induced Lost Decade. Likewise, Summers’ and Blanchard’s
concerns about inflation and overheating seem strange in light of the
decade-plus of target undershooting we’ve just lived through, the negative real
interest rates across the entire Treasury yield curve, expectations of low
inflation well into the future, and the fact that we still may not have
recovered pre-2008 trend GDP and may never do so. But I wanted to expand on my
thoughts about this economic debate a bit further here. …
Powell: Getting Back to a Strong Labor Market
Powell Just Said US Economy Has To Add 500,000 Workers Every Month Or He Won't Hike
“the economic reality.. [is] that the US economy is 10 million jobs down
from where it was a year ago. So.., to replace all these lost workers by
end-2022 - when consensus expects the first rate [hike] to take place - and
accounting for natural labor-market growth, means we will need an average
payrolls figure of over 500,00 every month through to next December.”
Hiring Crashed In December Despite Jump In Job Openings
Who should get a $1,400 check?
At this moment, there are 18 million more people on continuing
unemployment claims as there were a year ago. Over 11 million of them risk
losing benefits in a month. This pain has been almost entirely concentrated in
the low-wage sector, and by “low-wage” I mean making under $30,000 a year.
UMich Sentiment Signals Stagflation As Hope Plunges & Inflation Expectations Soar
Deflation, inflation or stagflation?
are the inflationists’ warnings valid?
First, they are really based on a quick and significant ‘Cape Cod’
economic recovery. But the pandemic is
not over yet and the vaccines have not been rolled out to any level to suppress
the virus sufficiently yet. What if the
new variants that are beginning to circulate are resistant to existing vaccines
so that a new ‘wave’ emerges? A summer
recovery could be delayed indefinitely. Moreover, these inflation forecasts are
based on two important theoretical errors, in my view. The first is that the huge injections of
credit money by the Fed and other central banks that we have seen since the
global financial crash in 2008-9 have not led to an inflation of consumer
prices in any major economy even during the period of recovery from 2010
onwards – on the contrary (see the US inflation graph above), US inflation
rates have been no more than 2% a year and they have been even lower in the
Eurozone and Japan, where credit injections have also been huge. Instead, what
has happened has been a surge in the prices of financial assets.
…
The problem is not inflationary ‘overheating’; it is whether the US
economy can ever recover sufficiently to get close to ‘full employment’.
Why Stimulus Doesn’t Lead To Organic Growth
Given the permanent loss in output and rising unproductive debt levels,
the recovery will be slower and more protracted than those hoping for a
“V-shaped” recovery. The “Nike Swoosh,” while more realistic, might be overly
optimistic as well.
Yes, we will get a short-term burst of inflation and interest rates, most
certainly. However, such will quickly collide headlong into the massive debt
levels overhanging the economy.
Such is the trap that will put the Federal Reserve in a box of hiking
rates and reducing monetary accommodation at precisely the wrong time.
UK Economy Crashed 9.9% In 2020, Biggest Drop In [ahem] 311 Years
Container shipping locked in a ‘significant
bottleneck’ as demand surges back
Port of Long Beach has best January on record
China Economy Rolling Over Hard Ahead Of Lunar New Year
Michael Every of Rabobank:
The January Chinese CPI print came in weaker than expected, dipping back
into deflationary territory y/y, though PPI was up from -0.4% to the heady
heights of 0.3% y/y, which for ‘build it and they will come’ China is quite
rare. Clearly though, even the massive liquidity being poured in via aggregate
financing and local governments --the IMF estimate of the consolidate fiscal
deficit is -18.8% of GDP in 2020, which gets no market fanfare at all!-- is
only seeing a patchy recovery at best. As they try to keep that liquidity out
of the overheating housing sector and indebted household sector, expect more
chills.
China’s Inequality Will Lead It to a Stark Choice: A New Oligarchy Can Be Restrained Only by the Government That Made It
as pointed out by (h/t) naked capitalism, impressively long list of signatories:
Cancel
the public debt held by the ECB and “take back control” of our destiny
Bubble Fare:
Crypto Boom Is ‘Speculative Mania,’ Bank of Canada
Deputy Says
Markets
are giddy about reopening — and that’s the problem
MMT Fare:
MOOC: Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century
Demystify macroeconomic principles and terminology and discover how
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) provides explanations for some of the world's most
troubling financial concerns.
COVID-19 notes:
Long-haul
symptoms should be a ‘wake-up call’ for young people when it comes to avoiding Covid, Texas Children’s doctor says.
About 10 to 30% of all Covid patients will suffer from long-haul
symptoms, according to the latest research from Mt. Sinai’s Center for
Post-Covid Care.
Why
the U.S. Is Underestimating COVID Reinfection
Why
COVID Vaccines Are Taking So Long to Reach You
How
to make COVID vaccines more effective: give people vitamin and mineral supplements
Effectiveness of Mask Wearing to Control Community Spread of SARS-CoV-2
compelling data now demonstrate that community mask wearing is an effective nonpharmacologic intervention to reduce the spread of this infection
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Study Warns Emissions Cuts Must Be 80% More Ambitious to Meet Even the Dangerously Inadequate 2°C Target
The dangers of
sustainability metrics
Business risk and the emergence of climate analytics
Abstract: Emerging awareness of climate-related financial risk has
prompted efforts to integrate knowledge of climate change risks into financial
decision-making and disclosures. Assessment of future climate risk requires
knowledge of how the climate will change on time and spatial scales that vary
between business entities. The rules by which climate science can be used
appropriately to inform assessments of how climate change will impact financial
risk have not yet been developed. In this Perspective, we summarize the demands
by the business and finance community for reliable climate information, and the
potential and limitations of such information in the context of what climate
models can and cannot currently provide.
Tim Jackson summarises the recent TRansit project which has pioneered a
novel agent-based, stock-flow consistent macro-economic model. Tim discusses
the findings from the project and sets them in the context of the Bank of
England’s work on ‘transition risk’.
EVs
Are the Lowest Climate Priority
If We Want to
Clean Up the Oceans, We Have to Confront the Fossil Fuel Giants
A majority of Canadians recognize the plastic pollution crisis for what
it is: a massive economic failure. It’s obvious that many of the products
currently made out of plastic don’t have to be. Yet the stuff is unavoidable,
even for the most informed and self-actualized consumer — the bedrock of the
self-regulating global market.
In the case of plastic, this was a carefully planned outcome. The
reusable-bag-toting locavores at your favorite farmer’s market are not actually
making a dent in plastic consumption. In fact, they may even be making things
worse. Plastic use is not going to decrease in a meaningful way if it is left
up to individual consumer choice... In the United States, the shale oil boom
has fed into a plastics bonanza that oil and gas companies desperately want to
draw out.
Where
the Streets are Paved with Thulium
The road to planetary destruction, it would seem, is paved with green intentions. So contends French documentary-maker Guillaume Pitron. All those clever inventions to keep the Arctic ice shelf from melting – solar panels, smart grids, wind turbines – suffer a fatal flaw: the need for rare metals. Prized for their exceptional magnetic properties, rare metals now appear in a swathe of modern technologies. In total, seventeen natural elements carry the descriptor ‘rare’, many of which sound like second-rate towns in Roman Britain – erbium, thulium, lutetium, yttrium. … The problem, predictably perhaps, lies in the word ‘rare’. Not only are reserves of these metals limited, but, where deposits do exist, they typically occur in tiny quantities. Notebook in hand, Pitron sets off across the world on an eight-year ‘technological odyssey’ to suss out the implications. His conclusion: things are not looking good. First, the environmental ramifications. …
which reminds me of a Thomas Sowell quote,
albeit from a bit different context:
Quote of the Week:
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”Pic of the Week:
EIA’s long-term forecasts
have to be taken with copious grains of salt, but, fwiw:
[COVID] Tweet of the Week:
In light of the worrisome spread of new #COVID19 variants in Alberta, today I called
on Jason Kenney to reverse his plan to ease pandemic restrictions and, instead,
embrace a #COVIDzero strategy.
[Markets] Tweet of the Week: (see
link for .gif)
High yield credit spreads at all-time lows (~3.2%) + Corporate Debt-to-GDP at all-time highs (51%).
2% inflation is a narrow line between a ROCK (pension default due to low rates) and a HARD PLACE (corporations default if they can't roll debt at low rates).
No
margin for error
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
ESG Fare:
From
anger to action: Differential impacts of eco-anxiety, eco-depression, and
eco-anger on climate action and wellbeing
Abstract
Research documents the
experiences of depression and anxiety evoked by climate change, but little
attention has been given to frustration and anger, or to untangling the effects
of different emotional responses to the climate crisis on human and planetary
health. Using Australian national survey data, we found that experiencing
eco-anger predicted better mental health outcomes, as well as greater
engagement in pro-climate activism and personal behaviours. Eco-anxiety and
eco-depression were less adaptive, relating to lower wellbeing. Interestingly,
those feeling eco-depressed were more likely to report participating in
collective climate action, while those feeling eco-anxious were less likely to
join the cause. Our findings implicate anger as a key adaptive emotional driver
of engagement with the climate crisis, and prompt warnings about the mental
health of populations increasingly worried and miserable about climate change.
Health
professionals, the Paris agreement, and the fierce urgency of now
Abstract
A stable climate is the most
fundamental determinant of human health. Therefore, the goal of the Paris
Agreement—limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius—is arguably
humanity's most important public health goal. To accomplish this goal, nearly
all nations must greatly increase the ambition of their Nationally Determined
Contributions at the upcoming United Nations COP26 meeting in 2021. We argue
that health professionals and health organizations can and must join the
growing global community of science-based advocates working to achieve the goal
of the Paris Agreement. Doing so can be our greatest contribution to the health
and wellbeing of all people, especially the world's most vulnerable,
marginalized and disempowered people who tend to be harmed first and worst.
Timothée Parrique, Giorgos Kallis – Degrowth:
Socialism without Growth
Notable (eco)socialists have
recently criticized the idea of degrowth. Here we want to argue that such
criticism is misplaced. Growth is a problem over and above capitalism. A
sustainable eco-socialism should reject any association with the ideology and terminology
of growth. 21st century socialists should start thinking how we can plan for
societies that prosper without growth. Like it not, growth is bound to come to
an end, the question is how; and whether this will happen soon or too late to
avert planetary disasters.
Any form of endless growth
is ecologically unsustainable….
COVID Fare:
‘Denier’
is the dirty word of the pandemic and is being wrongly used to shut down
the valid concerns of lockdown sceptics
The targeting of denial has little to do with the
distinct features of any specific issues. It is driven by a mood of intolerance
towards those who are sceptical of the received wisdom.
Red Alert
Warning About Pfizer and Moderna Covid Inoculations
Pfizer and Moderna mRNA inoculations aren’t what they’re
promoted to be.
As medically defined by the
CDC, vaccines are supposed to stimulate the “immune system to produce immunity
to a specific disease.”
Immunization is a “process
by which a person becomes protected against a disease through vaccination.”
The above is not what mRNA
inoculations are designed to do. They’re something else entirely.
They’re gene modifying
delivery systems that don’t produce immunity —what Moderna calls “gene therapy
technology.”
Not designed to prevent
seasonal flu-renamed covid illness, at most they may somewhat reduce symptoms
short-term.
Promoting mRNA technology as
vaccine protection from covid is part of a state-approved/media proliferated
mass deception scam.
The above technology is
unapproved by the FDA for human use because it’s experimental, inadequately
tested, and high-risk — especially for the elderly with weakened immune
systems.
The nanoparticle-based
delivery system is unapproved.
mRNA inoculations contain
hazardous polyethylene glycol (PEG) to deliver their DNA-altering technology to
human cells.
The risk of adverse events
increases greatly from follow-up inoculations, including to potentially
life-threatening anaphylactic shock.
In 2017, Moderna abandoned
mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles because tests caused large numbers of
adverse effects.
Yet the same gene therapy
and nanoparticle delivery system are used by Moderna and Pfizer in their
misnamed mRNA “vaccines” that aren’t what they’re called.
…
According to virologist Judy
Mikovits, LNPs can enter the brain, risking pathologic neuro-inflammation that
could cause multiple sclerosis, ALS, or other serious diseases.
Johns Hopkins explained that
potentially serious adverse events may occur after receiving follow-up mRNA
inoculations.
According to Children’s
Health Defense, “doctors link Pfizer (and) Moderna ‘vaccines’ to (a)
life-threatening blood disorder.”
Health Impact News reported
the following: ………
How Do We Know For Sure Public Health Authorities Are Lying About
Vaccines Protecting You From A Life-Threatening COVID-19 Infection? Because There Is
A Safer, More Economical & Efficacious Remedy Than Vaccines
Do you realize that you are
soon going to be forced to submit to inoculation with an experimental
gene-altering injection that really isn’t a vaccine regardless of whether you
already have antibodies against COVID-19 or not, and regardless of your
vulnerability to serious side effects (frailty, autoimmunity, allergy)?
…
God only know which vaccine
Americans will get. Health advisors say
four out of the first seven vaccines tested are expected to fail, thus exposing
large segments of the population to needless side effects, some which may be life-long
since RNA and DNA COVID-19 vaccines may alter the genetic makeup of individuals
forever. … The current plan to indiscriminately vaccinate the entire population
violates the first dictum of modern medicine: “first do no harm.”
…
The vaccine studies are only
intended to show immunization allays symptoms for a short while, not whether
vaccination prevents infection or saves lives.
But those who administer these shots will be immune from prosecution and
legal liability because these inoculations are administered under so-called
emergency life-threatening conditions.
Go figure.
All this forced vaccination
could be eliminated with one simple health practice. But that is not the political or medical
agenda. If there is one remedy (and
there is) that will prevent symptoms and death from COVID-19, the world
wouldn’t need any vaccines. The few who
develop severe symptoms would be treated and survive, and that would be that. And
if you think you will get vaccinated and cheat death, they are going to
vaccinate you and your loved ones over and over because they say COVID-19 keeps
mutating.
…
Another ruse in the ongoing
COVID-19 scam-demic is that public health authorities aren’t telling the public
there is more evidence that vitamin D saves lives than the current unproven
experimental vaccines.
…
It’s not really a vaccine:
In the current two-shot
inoculation schedule with RNA and DNA vaccines (these really aren’t vaccines,
they are gene-reprogramming treatments), the first round of vaccinations will
not appear to be too problematic. The
second round will produce a few more side effects. The immune system is being primed so when you
are infected with another corona cold virus maybe months later, your immune
system will attack your inner organs and you will die of sepsis and organ
failure which will appear to be unrelated to vaccination.
…
Skip the vaccines if you
can. Normalize the immune response with
supplemental vitamin A, D, zinc and selenium, so your body doesn’t start
attacking itself. The red wine molecule
resveratrol synergizes all of the above nutrients.
Take vitamin D supplements
every day. One study shows adults need
to supplement their diet with 8000 units of vitamin D per day, which is a far
cry from the Recommended Daily Allowance of 600 units (another evidence modern
medicine is hiding cures, this time by diluting dosage.
Zinc supplementation is
advised, 15-30 milligrams/day for adults.
And supplemental vitamin B1
should be added to your daily supplement regimen, preferably in fat-soluble
form (benfotiamine) and don’t consume at the same time as coffee or tea or
alcohol. And curb alcohol intake
altogether. B1 works better when taken
with magnesium. Alcohol depletes zinc and magnesium.
To my friends who are
blindly racing to get vaccinated I can only say that is an act of
ignorance. Fear causes humans to make
impulsive decisions. It is like a herd
of antelope running away from a pack of lions only to fall over the edge of a
cliff and die.
Why
politicians and doctors keep ignoring the medical research on Vitamin D and
Covid
It is probably not a good
idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my
emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have
ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a
critically important role in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19. It is
time to speak out forcefully now that a new, large-scale Spanish study
demonstrates not a just a correlation but a causal relationship between
high-dose Vitamin D treatment of hospitalised Covid patients and significantly
improved outcomes for their health.
Ian Welsh: The
Simplest Explanation For Not Breaking Covid Vaccine Patents
… if Covid is cured, well,
you can’t make money off Covid any more, can you?
Chronic Covid, mutating
constantly, means more and more vaccines, and more and more and more money for
vaccine makers.
Ghastly, and I know that
many readers are probably, “that’s absurd”, but consider, does it have both
explanatory and predictive power?
Does, “Covid makes the rich,
richer so they want it to keep going” have explanatory and predictive power?
Qui Bono? Who benefits?
Since the people who run our societies profit from Covid, why would they
actually want it over (remember, billionaires have become vastly richer.)
COVID VACCINE - the Nightmare Scenario
Imagine if the Covid vaccine
actually contributed to the spread of the infection rather than stopping it.
Can you imagine what a catastrophe that would be? Unfortunately, there are
signs that that is precisely what is happening in the countries that have
implemented the most aggressive vaccination programs. Take Israel, for example.
…. Ynet points out that… after six weeks in lockdown the situation didn’t
improve at all. Despite Israel leading the world mass vaccination experiment,
its COVID transmission rate is among the worst in the Western world. The Ynet
article stresses that “tomorrow at 7AM the third lockdown will end, a month and
a half after it was imposed – and the COVID data is much worse today compared
with the situation at the beginning… at the point of departure of the third
lockdown at the end of December, the rate of positive tests was 4.9%, the
number of critical hospitalized patients was then 949, the number of verified
cases was 4,010. On Tuesday, the positive rate was 8.9%, the number of patients
was 1,101 and the number of verified cases was 7,183. Even the R number, which
determines whether the epidemic is spreading, has risen again to 1.
Visualizing
Global Attitudes Towards the COVID-19 Vaccines
Political Fare:
“The great reset.”: Neoliberalism 2.0.
There are rumblings among
the Right and Libertarian factions of Western politics about a horrific plan
that Davos Man intends to unleash upon mankind: The Great Reset! While Western
conservatives and libertarians depict this as some sort of globalist attempt to
take advantage of the disruption caused by the Covid–19 pandemic to impose a
global, eco-socialist system of governance, this assessment is incomplete. At
bottom, the Great Reset is the expression of a movement based on greenwashing,
the fetishization of digital technology, and a neoliberal conceptual nucleus: a
corporate structural “reform” called stakeholder capitalism.
Let us be wary.
If one scratches the surface
of the Reset movement one can see why it should be viewed with skepticism and
caution. It has many questionable boosters. Credibility is not strong when
one’s movement is composed of such figures as Tony Blair, famous for foolishly
lending British support to the 2003 Iraq war, or corporations such as Nestlé,
notorious for taking worldwide advantage of lax tax laws and, further back in
history, its disgraceful exploitation of mothers in developing nations in what
is known infamously as “the baby formula scandal.” Indeed, the danger here is
that corporations are hurtling towards a complete usurpation of national
sovereignty, a global corporate coup intended not to impose a global Green New
Deal but to maintain the neoliberal order.
The Reset crowd’s roots in
Davos are not to be overlooked.
“The great reset,
part 2.” An attempted corporate coup.
Great
Reset? Putin Says, “Not So Fast”
Did you happen to catch the
most important political speech of the last six years?
It would have been easy to
miss given everything going on.
The annual World Economic
Forum took place last week via teleconference, what I’m calling Virtual Davos,
and at this year’s event, of course, the signature topic was their project
called the Great Reset.
…
And it was Putin’s speech
that brought down the house of cards that is the agenda of the WEF.
So Far, the
Biden Administration Is Shaping Up to Be Obama’s Third Term
Guantánamo
Prisoner to Joe Biden: ‘The Last Two Decades of My Life Have Been a Nightmare Without End’
Guantánamo is a daming
example of American lack of concern over the lives it casually ruins.
Why
Victoria Nuland Is Dangerous and Should Not Be Confirmed
New
NORAD Warfare Strategies and Canada’s Role in the Great Game Revisited
The future battleground
which Canada is being prepared to set up is to be found in the Arctic.
Edward Curtin: Opening the
CIA’s Can of Worms
“The CIA and the media are
part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important
book, The CIA As Organized Crime.
This is true. The corporate mainstream media are
stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological
operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an
international audience. We have long
been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the
hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their
own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by
The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as
the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations,
and assassinations at home and abroad.
Another way of putting this
is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on
important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream
media cannot be distinguished.
…
With the rise of alternate
media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment
felt threatened and went on the defensive.
It therefore should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate
media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of
free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged
elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate
media themselves.
Cult of Personality… not
just B.O. and J.T., but RBG and J.A. too:
Jacinda Ardern
Is Not Your Friend
Liberal pundits have found a
new icon in New Zealand’s center-left leader, Jacinda Ardern. Ardern may be
personable and engaging, but just like Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau, her
government isn’t meeting the urgent needs of working people.
Big Thoughts:
We each inhabit two very different worlds simultaneously: the real world, and the narrative world.
The real world is the physical world of matter, of atoms and molecules and stars and planets and animals wandering around trying to bite and copulate with each other. Science does not yet understand much of this world, but it can reasonably be said to have some degree of existence to it.
The narrative world is made of stories, of mental chatter about what’s going on. It is only related to the real world in the loosest of terms, and commonly has no relation to the real world whatsoever.
In the narrative world you exist as a person with a certain name and a certain life story with a mountain of adjectives attached to you, some believed consciously and some believed subconsciously. You are this, you are that. You are inadequate. You are inferior. You are clever. You are fat. You are unlovable. Whatever. Words, words, words, words, words.
In the real world what you think of as “you” exists as an organism, breathing and digesting and pulsing and moving in the appearance of time. No thoughts or words need to occur for this organism to exist; it just is whatever it is.
In the narrative world, your surroundings are experienced as friends and foes, good and bad, right and wrong, threatening and non-threatening. Churning, babbling stories about what’s happening pervade the experience of the narrative world: those people over there are bad people and should be punished. Those people over there are the good people and they should be rewarded. That man is blah blah blah. That woman is this and that.
In the real world, your surroundings are experienced as raw sensory data: sensory impressions arising in each point in spacetime. Breath going in, breath going out. The feeling of feet on the ground. Sound of a bird call. Sight of a passing car. It’s all just happening as it is, as whatever it is. Simple. Present.
In the narrative world, the United States changed dramatically on the 20th of January. If you live in one narrative echo chamber it changed dramatically for the better, if you live in the other narrative echo chamber it changed dramatically for the worse. But throughout the narrative world most agree that the 20th of January 2021 marked a very real and significant turn of events.
In the real world, things are moving in pretty much the same ways they were on January 19th. The money is moving in more or less the same directions at more or less the same rates. The weapons and troops are moving to more or less the same places in basically the same ways as before. The resources are behaving in essentially the same way. The people are moving in pretty much the same way. The actual, physical dynamics have remained predominantly unchanged.
The real world and the narrative world could not be more different. Skilled manipulators exploit these differences for their benefit like foreign exchange traders exploit the differences in world currency values. A religious manipulator can get you to hand over your real currency in exchange for narrative currency about eternal salvation or spiritual purification. A sexual predator can manipulate you into trading the real currency of sex for the narrative currency of “I think I’m in love with you”. A politician can manipulate you into trading the real currency of votes for the narrative currency of whatever they say on the campaign trail.
It’s very hard to control people in the real world by just using the means that are available in the real world. If you’re bigger and stronger than someone you can get them to hand over their sandwich by hitting them, or if you have a big stick or something. If you want to exert a large amount of control over a large number of people, though, you generally have to seize that control through the narrative world.
It’s easier to control people through the narrative world than the real world because the narrative world and its relationship with the real world is too complicated for most people to understand, whereas the real world is quite simple and straightforward. For this reason, a tremendous amount of energy goes into controlling the dominant narratives, the dominant stories that people tell about what’s going on in the world.
Convince people to accept the narrative that a government’s leader is an evil dictator in need of regime change, and you can trade that narrative for real world control over a crucial geostrategic region. Convince people to accept that the status quo is working fine and any attempts to change it are dangerous insanity, and you ensure that people will never rise up and take away your real world control. Convince people that anyone questioning your narratives is a conspiracy theorist or a Russian propagandist, and you ensure your continued hegemonic control over the narrative world.
The most powerful manipulators are the ones who have succeeded in exerting control over both the real world and the narrative world, and they pursue both agendas with equal emphasis. Populations in the real world who insist upon their own national, resource, financial, economic or military sovereignty are subject to real world attacks by bombs, starvation sanctions and special ops. Entities in the narrative world which threaten imperial narrative domination are attacked, smeared, marginalized and censored.
That’s all we are seeing with the increasingly shrill mainstream panic about disinformation, conspiracy theories, foreign propaganda and domestic extremism. Our rulers and their media lackeys are not compassionately protecting us from deception, they are ensuring that they remain the only ones authorized to administer deception. By golly the only ones allowed to deceive us should be our government, our news media, our teachers and our priests.
As China and its allies increasingly threaten the real-world hegemony of the US and its allies, operations in the narrative world are getting increasingly heated and intense. Expect continued demonization of Russia, and expect anti-China propaganda to get more and more noisy. Expect people to be herded into partisan echo chambers with thicker and thicker walls in the narrative world, because dividing them up in this way makes it much easier to administer propaganda to them.
The narrative world is getting more and more frenzied while the real world is headed toward disaster due to the military and ecological pressures created by our status quo. There are only a few ways this can possibly break, with the most obvious being mass scale climate disaster or nuclear war.
There is also the possibility that the human species goes the other way and adapts. Organisms always wind up hitting a juncture where they either adapt to a new situation or go extinct, and we are approaching our juncture now.
Throughout recorded history, all around the globe, wise humans have been attesting that it is possible to transcend our delusion-rooted conditioning and come to a lucid perception of the narrative world and reality. There are many names for this lucid perception, but the one that caught on most widely is enlightenment.
We all have this potential within us. It has been gestating in us for many millennia. As we approach our adaptation-or-extinction juncture, we are very close indeed to learning if that potential will awaken in us or not.
If it does, a healthy and harmonious world will shift from being an unimaginable pipe dream to something very achievable. No longer confused about the relationship between the real world and the narrative world, we will be able to perceive our actual situation clearly, unfiltered by manipulation, and begin collaborating to build something beautiful and unprecedented. Once we move out of our narrative manipulation-driven model of competition and domination, and into a lucidity-driven model of collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem, a lasting peace will open up to us all.
[Political] Tweet of the Week:
Democrats are not weak and they are not cowards. They are collaborators who work with Republicans to funnel more money to the capitalist class. The party cannot be reformed, moved left, or taken over. The path forward for the left is an independent socialist movement & party.
[COVID] Pic of the Week:
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