Regular Fare:
Mark Blyth – An Inflated
Fear of Inflation?
Doctorow: Political
economy vs inflation
No, Bonds Aren’t
Overvalued. They’re A Warning Sign.
The American
Gordian Knot and Alexander the Great is not in sight
While the big picture helps us understand the context for the current
predicament, it is crucial to recognize that the U.S. is facing 20 formidable
headwinds within the political, cultural, social and economic realm. Moreover,
they are all intertwined in complex feedback mechanisms
Quotes of the Week:
Jim Reid: “at this stage it’s hard
to see what gets us out of this perpetual high debt, high intervention, low
default, low productivity loop.”
Bubble Fare:
The Stock
Market’s Collapse is Near.
Hussman: Counting the Chickens Twice
Crypto Fare:
THE POWER OF RANDOMNESS:
ALGORAND AND THE FUTURE OF BLOCKCHAINS
The Interview - Crypto · Featuring Silvio Micali & Ash Bennington
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
The Climate
Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere
Canada has 20
per cent of the world’s freshwater reserves — this is how to protect it
COVID Fare:
UK government report: Covid-19 Response Spring 2021
Pics of the Week:
EXTRA [controversial
or non-market-related] FARE:
ESG Fare:
Welsh: All the Futures that Will Not Happen
Note that first graph very carefully. There is NO sign
in the actual numbers that we are doing anything of importance to stop this
trend. Kyoto and Paris have achieved nothing, which is to be expected, since
they were voluntary.
Let’s put this all together: massively rising
temperatures; more extreme weather events; changes in climate, including
rainfall patterns; massive depletion of aquifers at the same time as we can
expect many rivers to lose volume or dry up; no effective political action.
…
We’ve just had ourselves a lesson in what exponential
growth looks like. There is every reason to expect that at least some parts of
ecosystem collapse and climate change will act that way: When break points are
reached, they will accelerate, and nothing we can do will stop them. Worst case
scenario is a hothouse Earth in which humanity goes extinct, but entirely
plausible scenarios see the Earth losing half or more of its carrying capacity.
The process will involve a lot of death, suffering,
and war.
There’s a decent chance we get a marine inundation
event. Rather than water rising by small amounts every year, at some point it
rises very quickly, and large amounts of the coast flood permanently.
Remember that the “moderate” estimates have almost all
been wrong. The “worst case” scenarios, for decades now, have been coming in
correctly.
All of which is to say, whatever future you think
you’re going to have, you need to run it past this lens. Does it survive this?
…
The clock is ticking, we are running out of time to do
whatever it is we want to do, and it is very likely that we are past the point
of no return; that even if we were to go all-out to stop climate change and
environmental collapse (we won’t), we could — at best — limit it to “losing
half the population.”
Why Progress Always Required Space Travel
… BUT none of this matters in a larger sense because
the real problem isn’t running out of lithium or copper or helium or any other
simple substance like that. It’s destroying the biosphere, climate and
ecosphere.
Earth’s true wealth is an intricate web of life, from
creatures simpler than bacteria all the way up to blue whales, including plants
and fungi and insects and a wild variety of creatures we don’t understand or
haven’t even discovered.
That, along with Earth’s climate, is what you can only
get on Earth, at least within the solar system. That’s what we’re destroying.
So… space exploitation? Why not. It may help deal with
some bottlenecks. But it still won’t let us continue GROWTH and the standard
progress model, because the real limit to growth is simply that if we go past
the Earth’s carrying capacity — which I will say, despite some disagreeing with
me — we unequivocally have, we then start destroying that carrying capacity and
all the things we must have that only Earth supplies.
Earth is the Jewel, the most important place in the
universe for humans, right now. We cannot do without it and what is important
about it is not copper or lithium, it is precisely climate and LIFE
(ecosystems). Our destruction of those two things is what makes the standard
model of progress impossible.
We’ve got a limited resource, created by processes of
evolution which take millions of years to work. We are so ignorant we cannot
even create a self-sustaining biosphere; we cannot fix what we are breaking.
Anyone and any system destroying the Earth’s climate
and ecosphere is thus, then, doing the greatest wrong possible for the future
of humanity, and of much life on Earth. Our mass genocide of other species is a
slow form of strangling ourselves.
Space can help, but it won’t get us around the real
issues. Only true respect for the genuine non-renewable resources we MUST have
and which exist only on Earth can create a positive future for humanity and for
all the species we have held hostage and not yet murdered, who are unfortunate
enough to be trapped on Earth with us.
Why Collapse Is Inevitable: The Truth About Climate
Change
There are multiple extinction level events converging
on humanity but climate change is the event that makes societal collapse
inevitable.
The reality of climate change is worse than most
people realise.
400ppm = 3°C+
James Hansen, 2008: "Human-made climate change is
delayed by ocean and ice sheet response times. Warming ‘in the pipeline’,
mostly attributable to slow feedbacks, is now about 2°C. No additional forcing
is required to raise global temperature to at least the level of the
Pliocene."
James Hansen, 2018: "the results confirm the
tight control of CO2 on global temperature. This figure implies that the eventual
warming for 407ppm CO2 will be about 3.5°C.
We can quickly research online that 400ppm of
atmospheric CO2 results in a Pliocene-like global temperature of 3°C to 4°C.
This is where the earth is headed, and beyond, as a
certainty of physics. Temperature stabilisation below 1.5°C or 2°C is a cruel
fantasy.
The purpose of the IPCC, a governmental agency
controlled by fossil fuel interests, is to keep the public unaware of the truth
so that societies can continue to function as normal.
There are no real-world carbon budgets or scenarios
which enable humanity to burn more fossil fuels with a % chance of staying
below 1.5°C or 2°C (or even 3°C). In the real world, humanity is in 1 trillion
tonnes of CO2 DEBT.
Decarbonisation ACCELERATES warming.
James Hansen, 2011: "Global warming has been
limited, as aerosol cooling partially offsets GHG warming. But aerosols remain
airborne only several days, so they must be pumped into the air faster and
faster to keep pace with increasing long-lived GHGs. However, concern about
health effects of particulate air pollution is likely to lead to eventual
reduction of human-made aerosols. Thereupon the Faustian payment will come
due."
Hansen calculates that the global cooling effect of
aerosols is -1.6 watts per square metre. This equates to 1.2°C of cooling which
means that particulate air pollution, mostly from coal-burning, is protecting
humanity from half of global warming.
Earth's Real Climate Sensitivity is Very High.
…
Art Berman: What will happen to world population if
fossil energy is abandoned?
Extreme population decline
is the part of the renewable utopia that no one talks about
(I'm all for it but I doubt
most true believers understand)
COVID Fare:
Halt Covid
Vaccine, Prominent Scientist Tells CDC
In a public comment to the
CDC, molecular biologist and toxicologist Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D.,
called to immediately halt Covid vaccine production and distribution. Citing
fertility, blood-clotting concerns (coagulopathy), and immune escape, Dr. Lindsay
explained to the committee the scientific evidence showing that the coronavirus
vaccines are not safe.
…
Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., an
expert in protein synthesis, believes that Dr. Lindsay’s hypothesis is correct.
“I absolutely share these concerns,” Dr. Seneff, who is a senior research
scientist at MIT, wrote to me in a sobering email.
“The potential for blood
clotting disorders and the potential for sterilization are only part of the
story. There are other potential long-term effects of these vaccines as well,
such as autoimmune disease and immune escape, whereby the vaccines administered
to immune-compromised people accelerate the mutation rate of the virus so as to
render both naturally acquired and vaccine-induced antibodies no longer effective.”
The novel
coronavirus’ spike protein plays additional key role in illness
Salk researchers and
collaborators show how the protein damages cells, confirming COVID-19 as a
primarily vascular disease
The BBC &
Bloomberg on India: B stands for bullshit.
Unless you made an early
getaway to Planet Drongo before the lockdown, you will have read pretty much
everywhere that “India sees world’s highest daily cases amid oxygen shortage”.
In fact, the BBC tells us that “some people” have died waiting for oxygen, the
Indian health service is “completely overwhelmed” and the country now has
“sixteen million cases”.
So it’s a disaster, right?
Well actually, no – it isn’t. The Indian health ministry has already made it
clear that the Covid19 variant they’re dealing with this year has “a
considerably lower death rate than the previous version”.
Go to the Worldometer site,
and you’ll see that India’s deaths per million is a minute 134: that’s 7% of
the US and French figures, 6% of the UK and Italy’s and the lowest by far of
any country in the Top 30 for cases.
Virtually no vaccination has
been undertaken in India (only 1.3% are fully vaccinated) and the country is
not using lockdowns. The Times of India has just denied the BBC’s ‘deaths from
oxygen shortage’ fakery.
What India IS doing,
however, is employing the anti-inflammatory drugs tocilizumab and itolizumab
and the antivirals favipiravir and hydroxychloroquine on a very wide scale. Go
to Pharma site/accolyte spaces, and you’ll see all four drugs being rubbished: the
Pharmafia and their bureaucratic whores don’t want any signs of a success to
get out.
But the Truth already is out
there: India is doing spectacularly well without either vaccines or lockdown.
You won’t find that reality expressed anywhere in the Western MSM, but the
facts show that its infection management drugs have delivered one of the lowest
case to death rates on the planet.
The Israeli
People Committee’s April Report on the Lethal Impact of Vaccinations
The Israeli People Committee
(IPC), a civilian body made of leading Israeli health experts, has published
its April report into the Pfizer vaccine’s side effects.* The findings are catastrophic
on every possible level. Their verdict is that “there has never been a vaccine
that has harmed as many people.” The
report is long and detailed. I will outline just some of the most devastating
findings presented in the report…
Significant Jump
This Week in Reported Injuries, Deaths After COVID Vaccine
Why are the
COVID vaccines so toxic?
Oxford jab
‘could be banned for under-40s’ after blood clot reports double
CO-Vid of the Week:
Dr John Lee: Covid: is the
cure worse than the disease?
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
The Global Deep
State: A New World Order Brought to You by COVID-19.
India’s “Covid
Crisis” has been hijacked – The Mainstream Media are lying to you
Orwellian Fare:
How science has
been corrupted
The pandemic has revealed a
darkly authoritarian side to expertise
…
This could be viewed as part
of a larger shift within institutions from a culture of persuasion to one in
which coercive moral decrees emanate from somewhere above, hard to locate
precisely, but conveyed in the ethical style of HR. Weakened by the
uncontrolled dissemination of information and attendant fracturing of
authority, the institutions that ratify particular pictures of what is going on
in the world must not merely assert a monopoly of knowledge, but place a
moratorium on the asking of questions and noticing of patterns.
…
One of the most striking
features of the present, for anyone alert to politics, is that we are
increasingly governed through the device of panics that give every appearance
of being contrived to generate acquiescence in a public that has grown
skeptical of institutions built on claims of expertise. And this is happening
across many domains. Policy challenges from outsiders presented through fact
and argument, offering some picture of what is going on in the world that is
rival to the prevailing one, are not answered in kind, but are met rather with
denunciation. In this way, epistemic threats to institutional authority are
resolved into moral conflicts
…
The spectacular success of
“public health” in generating fearful acquiescence in the population during the
pandemic has created a rush to take every technocratic-progressive project that
would have poor chances if pursued democratically, and cast it as a response to
some existential threat. In the first week of the Biden administration, the
Senate majority leader urged the president to declare a “climate emergency” and
assume powers that would authorise him to sidestep Congress and rule by
executive fiat. Ominously, we are being prepared for “climate lockdowns”.
…
Early in 2020, public
opinion accepted the necessity of a short-term suspension of basic liberties on
the supposition that, once the emergency had passed, we could go back to being
not-China. But this is to assume a robustness of liberal political culture that
may not be warranted. Lord Sumption, a jurist and retired member of the UK’s
Supreme Court, makes a case for regarding lockdowns in the West as the crossing
of a line that is not likely to get uncrossed.
…
In the US as in the UK, the
government has immense powers. “The only thing that protects us from the
despotic use of that power is a convention that we have decided to discard.”
…
It has been said, a people
gets the government it deserves.
Tweets of the Week:
Taylor Hudak: We are living in a time where...
1. Elites (WEF) are creating
a globalist future for us all (that we didn't vote for)
2. Our economy is being
destroyed
3. There's mass coercion to
take an experimental vaccine
4. There's censorship &
deplatforming of dissenting voices
Why?
Geo-Political Fare:
Johnstone: The Day the
World Ended
The day the world ended
began like any other day. People woke up, had their coffee, checked their
social media, kissed their loved ones, went to work.
Nobody knew it was coming.
The news reporters and pundits hadn’t been informing them that the US and its
allies had been simultaneously ramping up aggressions against two nuclear-armed
nations in a way that could easily lead to something going catastrophically
wrong, or explained to them what this could mean for them and their loved ones.
The mass media had never let the truth interfere with the military agendas of
their government before, and, as it turns out, they never would.
Nobody knew it was coming, so
nobody opposed the dangerous acts of brinkmanship that led up to it. Nobody
resisted as the Democrats manufactured consent for escalation after escalation
against Russia. Nobody resisted as the Republicans manufactured consent for
escalation after escalation against China. Nobody objected as war ships were
moved, as troops were deployed, as Nuclear Posture Reviews became more and more
hawkish and aggressive, as new armageddon weapons were manufactured and
fielded, as proxy conflicts were backed, as war planes encroached upon
sovereign airspace, as missiles were readied for swift deployment.
So it simply did not feature
in anyone’s mind that this could be the day they and their loved ones die in a
nuclear holocaust….
New(ish) Section – CaitOz Quotes of the Week:
There are many people who
understand that we are ruled by sociopaths who manipulate our society into alignment
with their greedy and power-grabbing agendas, and that most of our world’s
problems arise from this fact. It is not difficult to see and understand this
for yourself; there are more than enough readily available facts in evidence to
make it abundantly clear to anyone with the time and willingness to look. Yet
it remains a relatively fringe understanding, far short of the numbers it would
take to make a real difference in our world…
The problem is not that we
are lacking in sufficient evidence that we are living in an unacceptably
dystopian oligarchic empire, the problem is that people can’t see the evidence
that is already available to them. Science already tells us that hard facts aren’t
enough to change someone’s mind, and that we have whole cognitive defense
systems in place to protect our preexisting perceptions. It doesn’t matter how
much information is handed to someone if they are fighting like hell to prevent
the death-like experience of having their entire worldview ripped away from
them. The trick is finding new and innovative ways to breach those defenses.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Kunstler: This was only one of
countless mysteries orbiting around the dimming star that is Joe Biden. The
biggest one, the planet Jupiter of all puzzlements, is how the guy managed to
get elected occupant of the oval office. Or, more to the point, how did others
manage to get him elected? I mean, considering those few embarrassing campaign
forays from the basement to a bunch of empty parking lots back in the fall of
2020, not to mention the supernatural victory on Super Tuesday that rescued his
pitiful old ass from the glue factory of broken-down political war-horses.
Yarvin: The sooner we stop pretending
that this isn’t happening to us, the better results we can get. Wouldn’t it be
nice to get to Caesar, Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, without passing through
Sulla and Marius, Crassus and Spartacus? Alas, from here and now it seems
unlikely. But I can’t see why every serious person wouldn’t want to try.
@pdxsag: Prior to 2020 I thought
half the people in the world were reliable mutuals, if just needing the right
encouragement. Now I think maybe 14% of the people in the world are capable of
thinking for themselves, and 2-5% of standing up against petty tyranny.
Other Fare:
The frivolity of
the pundit right
"One must ruthlessly write what one knows to be
the truth, or else shut up."
There are three kinds of dissidents: (a) anons, (b) pundits who still
care what people think, and (c) outsiders who DGAF. All these groups are great;
real greatness can be achieved in any of them; and good friends I have in each.
But each has its problems.
The problem with (c) is that it’s too hard. It takes a lot of luck to get
there and stay there. It’s quite inconsistent with doing anything else with
your life—and this under conditions of very mild repression, historically
speaking. And the more you succeed, the more dangerous your position becomes. I
would recommend the outside way to only one kind of young person: le
trustafarian. And it has to really be your calling.
The problem with (a) is that it’s too easy—nothing binds you to reality.
The dissident anons create the best art, yet never without some slight sense of
playing tennis without the net. Yet this complete, even excessive, artistic
freedom is balanced by challenges in opsec that compare only to general
aviation. If you are not meticulous enough to fly a Cessna, you are not
meticulous enough to shitpost.
The problem with (b) is that you are always policing yourself. Not only
do your readers never really know what you really believe—you never really know
yourself. In practice, it is much easier to police your own thoughts than your
own words. When choosing between two ideas, the temptation to prefer the safer
one is almost irresistible. This is a source of cognitive distortion which the
anons and outsiders do not experience. (Though anons do suffer something of the
opposite, a reflex to provoke.)
As a pundit, you sense this stress in every bone of your body; you can
never show it to your readers. This creates a deep dishonesty in the parasocial
relationship between writer and reader—like a marriage that can never escape
some foolish first-date fib. The falsity, like the blue in blue cheese, flows
through and flavors every particle of your content. Neither you nor your
readers can ever be sure whether you are speaking the truth, lying to them, or
lying to yourself—but you are constantly doing all three. You may still be very
entertaining—enlightening, even. All your work is ephemeral, and once you die
only your relatives will remember you. And it’s not even your fault.
Out here in group (c), I can tell you that Homo sapiens is not a
neurologically uniform population (like golden retrievers), and also that the
Holocaust happened (like you learned in Holocaust class). While I cannot
imagine what evidence could change my mind on either of these points, if it
does I will be the first to tell you. (Don’t bother sending me your favorite
Holocaust revisionist essay—I have probably read it.) This clarity is no
function of any special personal virtue—just my job of living in group (c).
From my perspective, both the anonymous and official dissidents exhibit a
kind of unserious frivolity, but a very different kind. The frivolity of the
anon is imaginative, surreal and playful at best, merely puerile at worst. The
frivolity of the pundit has no upside; in every paragraph he is breaking
Koestler’s rule, and he knows it; the best he can do is to shut up selectively
about the things he cannot write about.
And his mens rea, too, is awful. He is selling hope. He is selling
answers. Pity the man whose life has brought him to the position of selling
answers in which he does not believe, or which he is forced to believe, or
which he must force himself to believe. However sophisticated and erudite he
may be, he is just a high-end grifter. His little magazine is a Macedonian troll-farm
with a PhD.
Satirical Fare:
CDC’S GUIDELINES
FOR WHEN IT’S SAFE TO STILL WEAR LOUNGE PANTS.
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