Regular Fare:
With the perceived shift to a more hawkish stance, the Fed did itself a bit of a favor. Tightening policy implies less inflation in the future. Longer-term yields discount this phenomena in the out years. That is precisely what happened late last week. If the Fed was going to allow inflation to run hot, that implies yields should be higher to account for it. What the Fed did was threaten not to allow that to happen in a meaningful way, and inflation expectations reacted accordingly. Again, that is to be expected.
Today we had a parting shot
from Andy Haldane on leaving the Bank of England, in. which he claimed
inflation will be 4% by Christmas, unleashed as the economy gets over Covid.
I seriously wonder about the
ability of people like Haldane to analyse data. He has long had a theory that
all the spending deferred by Covid will be unleashed when the pandemic is over
and that inflation will result, and the only credit you can give him is that he
has stuck to the theory, even though there is no evidence to support it.
Post 2008 it took eight
years for consumers to start spending at pre-crash levels in proportion to
income. This crisis was worse, threatened more jobs, created more unemployment
(albeit still disguised, but furlough is ending now) and there was no Brexit
impact to add the air of general economic unease. There are literally no
reasons why anyone barring the quite wealthy should go on spending bonanzas now
that will wipe out their Covid savings. As I noted this morning, there are
already signs that the spending boom is fading.
…
I accept that does not mean
there will be no inflation: …. But what we have not got is a scenario remotely
close to a boom. The risk we face is of a major collapse in the private sector,
and especially amongst smaller companies. That's the result of spending not
growing, effective lockdowns continuing, and government support being withdrawn
as debt burdens have to be repaid. That's a massive triple whammy. But that's
not anywhere on the horizon of the Treasury or the likes of Haldane, who are
all deeply comfortable in their own little economic bubbles where they are not
exposed to the real world of business, in which none of them has ever been
engaged.
Other . Charts:
Bubble Fare:
The cryptocurrency ecosystem is conceptually simple. Money comes in from
new investors buying, and the same money comes out to pay those cashing out. It
would be a zero-sum ecosystem, except for the fact that miners have to pay
their bills in dollars. This is why “bitcoin investors” feel an immediate urge
to tell everyone else to invest in bitcoin — if no new money comes in, the
financial structure eventually collapses under the miner’s sell pressure.
COVID-19 notes:
COVID-19 in
Ontario: January 15, 2020 to July 1, 2021
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Study shows
today's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels greater than 23 million-year record
Ground
Temperatures Hit 118 Degrees in the Arctic Circle
The Fossil Fuel
Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to Greenwash
The G7 announcement is “about as effective as sprinkling a few drops of
water on a raging forest fire,” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media,
a nonprofit media lab working to end fossil fuels. “First, the G7 failed to set a clear deadline
for ending coal use; second, by saying they’re only ending ‘direct’ government
support, they leave room for all sorts of loopholes that could funnel money
towards new coal plants; and third, the term ‘unabated’ means they’re leaving
room for plants that say they’ll use carbon capture and sequestration
technology, something that has proven thus far to be a colossal failure.”
Analysis: When
do electric vehicles become cleaner than gasoline cars?
But, for more context and a lot more detail, see:
Electric car:
697,612 km to become green! True or false?
And now the calculation!
Based on the above assumptions, we calculate the number of kilometres
traveled from which an electric car starts to emit less CO2 than a
petrol-driven car.
Per 100 km traveled, our electric vehicle will produce 13.68 [kg CO2 /
100 km] – 11 [kg CO2 / 100 km] = 2.68 kg of CO2 less than a petrol-driven
vehicle. We remind that the manufacturing of the battery was producing 10153 kg of CO2. The vehicle
will therefore have to travel 10153 [kg CO2] /2.68 [kg CO2] x 100 [km] = 378,843
km to reach parity. That’s less than the originally announced 697,612 km. … With
our new set of assumptions, an electric vehicle with a battery of 80 kWh would
begin to have a lower carbon footprint than a petrol-driven vehicle somewhere
between 67,226 km and 151,259 km traveled. With the old set of assumptions,
this would be in the range of 298,507 km – 671,641 km.
…
Epilogue: A great friend of mine, who could be described as a radical
ecologist, told me, with a touch of ironic humour: « It is totally outrageous
that the title of this article published on the RTBF website suggests that an electric
vehicle can be green! » It’s a sobering thought.
Pics of the Week:
Fire clouds
spark 710,117 lightning strikes in western Canada in 15 hours
Wildfires can generate self-amplifying weather.
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Regular Fare:
Narcissism +
Neoliberalism = The Life Of I
When confronted with the realities of everyday life, whether it be
witnessing shoppers seeking solace from stress through consumption, or the
culture of hyper-competitiveness in the workplace, it is difficult to think of
Western neoliberal society as anything other than an alignment of corporate
psychopathy and narcissistic behaviour traits of a kind depicted superbly in
films such as American Psycho and Wall Street.
As a Social Philosopher whose work is focused in this area, Anne Manne,
understands these connections and their societal implications. Manne says that
the core elements that constitute a narcissistic character are an unstable
sense of self and what the writer calls the three Es — an overwhelming sense of
entitlement, a willingness to exploit others and a lack of empathy.
In addition, Manne says that if criticised, the narcissist will retaliate
with humiliated fury and, in the workplace, often try and take credit for
things that other people do by giving an impression of being a better and more
successful person than they are.
…
This harsher, more punitive, and hyper-competitive system has caused more
narcissistic behaviour and has led to the hollowing out and corruption of the
institutions of education, business and government. In this kind of situation,
new forms of self-enhancement take over and narcissism becomes the key to getting
ahead. This, in turn helps ensure that high levels of inequality are
maintained. Neoliberalism, inequality and narcissism are thus mutually
reinforcing phenomena beneficial to the elites.
Ruthlessness, a lack of empathy and the ability to subordinate those
around you, are the kinds of obnoxious traits needed for a narcissist to get
ahead.
…
For the past two decades, the work of Dr. Clive Boddy has focused on
psychopaths in the workplace. Boddy says that corporate psychopaths have many
of the same character traits as narcissists — deceitful, manipulative, public humiliation of others, a lack of empathy,
falsely charismatic, egotistical, self-centred etc. … research which estimates
that around 23 per cent of males have sufficient psychopathic traits to be
problematic for society.
ESG Fare:
MicroStrategy,
ESG and Bitcoin
MSTR holds roughly 0.7% of
the active supply of bitcoin. And is thus, responsible, indirectly for 452,000
tons of CO2e emissions per year, or 996 million pounds. MSTR is, officially, a
software company. With roughly $480 million in revenues in 2020, that means for
every dollar of revenue generated, MSTR is responsible for 2.07 pounds of CO2.
A SOFTWARE COMPANY! And this is assuming the rest of their business generates
zero carbon footprint. Western Midstream Partners (Ticker: WES) is a pipeline
company with 15,000 miles of pipeline delivering crude, natural gas and refined
products. Their 2019-2020 ESG reportindicates that they were responsible for
3.5 million tons of direct CO2e emissions and 0.97 tons of indirect emissions.
The company brings in $2.7 billion in revenues, and while revenues are hardly a
perfect proxy of economic value, for comparison’s sake, that is 3.66 pounds of
CO2e for every dollar of revenue.
Yasha Levine: Joe Costello on
Energy and Democracy
It’s obvious that we have to
figure out new ways of living that don’t totally depend on the death-drive,
hyper-industrial technologies that surround us today. It’s also obvious that in
order to do that we’ll have to return, at least in some aspects, to slower,
more local, pre-industrial modes of living. But I’m not so sure we’re capable
of making this kind of transition, without being forced to by some kind of
massive collapse or calamity that will be outside of our control. Our politics,
our culture — everything’s too locked in to the present way of doing things. In
fact, the rest of the world’s ferociously trying to catch up with the high-energy
lifestyle pioneered by America and put in place by cheap fossil fuel energy. So
if anything, all trends are headed the other way: to more energy production,
more consumption, more digging, more stuff, more trash, more pollution. The
system is totally entrenched. Hell, it’s still considered cool and radical for
the popular left here in the imperial core to push for more nuke energy. People
simply cannot imagine living in a society organized around different energy
values. And I sympathize. It’s hard for me to imagine it, too.
Costello: Power is organization. All politics is about power, thus about
organization. Yet understanding organization, in concept, structure, and
process, is mostly missing from American politics today. Largely never
understood, the greatest organizing force of the Industrial era was fossil
fuels. The mass scale burning of fossil fuels resulted in an unprecedented
global reorganization of nature, human society, and culture. In understanding
energy's role in organizing human affairs, a recent book titled Energy and
Civilization A History, by Vaclav Smil, is seminal, essential, and excellent. I
would place Smil's work aside Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, as
ingenioushistory that helps us understand the past and present, offering much
needed guidance for a necessary reshaping of the future.
COVID Fare:
Mass
mask-wearing notably reduces COVID-19 transmission
Mask-wearing has been a
controversial measure to control the COVID-19 pandemic. While masks are known
to substantially reduce disease transmission in healthcare settings (Howard et
al 2021), studies in community settings report inconsistent results (Brainard
et al 2020). Investigating the inconsistency within epidemiological studies, we
find that a commonly used proxy, government mask mandates, does not correlate
with large increases in mask-wearing in our window of analysis. We thus analyse
the effect of mask-wearing on transmission instead, drawing on several datasets
covering 92 regions on 6 continents, including the largest survey of
individual-level wearing behaviour (n=20 million) (Kreuter et al 2020). Using a
hierarchical Bayesian model, we estimate the effect of both mask-wearing and
mask-mandates on transmission by linking wearing levels (or mandates) to
reported cases in each region, adjusting for mobility and non-pharmaceutical
interventions. We assess the robustness of our results in 123 experiments
across 22 sensitivity analyses. Across these analyses, we find that an entire
population wearing masks in public leads to a median reduction in the
reproduction number R of 25.8%, with 95% of the medians between 22.2% and
30.9%. In our window of analysis, the median reduction in $R$ associated with
the wearing level observed in each region was 20.4% [2.0%, 23.3%]. We do not find
evidence that mandating mask-wearing reduces transmission. Our results suggest
that mask-wearing is strongly affected by factors other than mandates. We
establish the effectiveness of mass mask-wearing, and highlight that wearing
data, not mandate data, are necessary to infer this effect.
Denninger: The Pandemic Is
Over; Shots are Worthless
As I pointed out when this
began the natural evolutionary pressure on a virus causes more-easily
transmitted and less-virulent strains to “win.” The reason for this is not that
a virus has intelligence, but simply mathematics: Each person can get infected
once, after which they have immunity. Even if that immunity is not perfect it
prevents nearly all serious harm on re-infection; ergo, whatever strain gets
you first is the only one you have to worry about. A more-transmissible
mutation makes it more-likely for you to get that mutation first. However, a
more-virulent strain makes it more-likely that a thinking organism, that is, a
human, will shun the person in question because they are visibly ill.
Nobody deliberately exposes
themselves to a possibly-deadly pathogen if they see someone who is ill; ergo,
once it is established that some disease can kill rather than inconvenience
(e.g. the sniffles) anyone displaying symptoms is actively avoided. This makes
it less-likely for the virus to “succeed” in infecting the next person. If you
tamper with this process with non-sterilizing vaccines that have
nearly-universal coverage you can cause highly-virulent strains to circulate
without being suppressed since the vaccinated person is both unlikely to be
visibly ill and being vaccinated, if you make a public spectacle of it, means
people won’t be afraid of them if they display symptoms even though they should
be. This is how you get a break-through of a highly-virulent strain that has
many times higher fatality rates, and if it happens you’re ****ed.
That was a risk we ran but
fortunately the shots were both too late and there are too many hold-outs for
this to happen. When uptake started to slow in the US I pointed out that a
Marek’s disease nightmare, which was originally one of my concerns, was almost
impossible because there was a large reservoir of people who refused the shots
(myself included); their side effect profile bothered me a lot, they looked
more dangerous compared to my risk from the virus and, in addition, I knew of
and had early treatment options the media, government and pharma wanted
suppressed and did suppress including HCQ, Ivermectin and now, it appears, some
SSRIs.
This is a debate we all
should have had in the open but, of course, we did not because social media,
governments and so-called "experts" all conspired together to prevent
it. This is not conjecture nor a
conspiracy theory; Youtube will kick off their platform anyone talking about
early treatments. Indeed Peter Kory had
his Senate testimony removed by Youtube for this reason. Imagine that -- formal, sworn testimony
before The US Senate is deemed "misinformation" and removed from your
view.
Never mind the rest of the
media which has all decided collectively to do the same thing and lie, costing
hundreds of thousands of lives in the US alone.
Fox News ran a story a
couple of days ago with this bald-faced lie as just one of many examples: Until
this week, the only medicines shown to boost survival were steroids given to
patients sick enough to need extra oxygen and intensive care.
Of course the "new
drugs" being investigated will be on-patent and expensive. Existing drugs proved to work such as
Ivermectin, HCQ, some SSRIs and others are still being ignored despite clinical
trial evidence. There are over seven
hundred trials of these drugs but you cannot mention any of those trials on
said media. That's right -- you will be
banned and censored if you reference formal medical studies on social media,
you cannot talk about them on any of the mainstream media TV or radio shows nor
on Youtube. I personally had a study
taken down and this area of my blog exists because Google forbids advertising
on any page that mentions formal medical studies they disagree with!
No, these drugs don't work
100% of the time -- nothing does. But
they do work by the science, and that should have been what we did; had we done
so hundreds of thousands of people in the US would not have died.
Now we have a paper out of
the UK -- a formal report out of their NHS (National Health Service) proving
that I and a few others were right -- Covid-19 was inevitably going to turn
into the flu -- a circulating virus in the general population that would
occasionally kill someone but had a roughly 0.1% chance among symptomatic persons
of doing so, which is statistically identical to the flu (0.15% CFR.)
It has now happened; the
Delta variant appears to be more-contagious but produces the sniffles and mild
to moderate cold symptoms nearly all the time.
Note that this is not the IFR/CFR divergence we originally saw; this is
the CFR, and it is official government data out of the UK.
This is exactly what I and a
handful of others predicted would happen and now it has.
But in addition, while the
CFR is now the flu and this "variant" is more-contagious the shots
are worse than worthless -- they're harmful -- as well. Look here: Delta is less deadly than flu
(0.1% CFR .vs. 0.15% CFR) in unvaccinated people but is more than six times as
deadly among vaccinated individuals if you get infected anyway. If you took the shot and get infected the
bottom line is that you ****ed yourself; congratulations. And no, you don't get to blame unvaccinated
people; they get a cold so shut the **** up.
The failure of PCR mass testing
In March 2020, SPR warned
that PCR mass testing in the general population (“test, test, test”) would be a
serious mistake. The issue never was that PCR tests didn’t work or that the
Drosten PCR paper was “peer-reviewed” in just one day. The issue is that PCR
tests cannot determine an acute infection, ongoing infectiousness, and actual
disease, especially if ct values are not taken into account. Several studies
have since shown that national PCR testing rates have had no influence at all
on covid mortality. In addition, a new German study re-analyzed PCR tests of
160,000 people and concluded: “In light of our findings that more than half of
individuals with positive PCR test results are unlikely to have been
infectious, RT-PCR test positivity should not be taken as an accurate measure
of infectious SARS-CoV-2 incidence. Our results confirm the findings of others
that the routine use of ‘positive’ RT-PCR test results as the gold standard for
assessing and controlling infectiousness fails to reflect the fact ‘that 50-75%
of the time an individual is PCR positive, they are likely to be
post-infectious.’” (Stang et al, Journal of Infection, May 2021)
Why has mass PCR testing
failed so badly? Most likely because of the role of pre-symptomatic
transmission: by the time someone gets a ‘positive’ test result, the infectious
virus is already being neutralized, or in some cases is already long gone.
Hence PCR testing really only makes sense in targeted, preemptive high-risk
settings, such as hospitals, nursing homes or early border controls
Myocarditis
Following Immunization With mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines in Members of the US
Military
A total of 23 male patients
(22 currently serving in the military and 1 retiree; median [range] age, 25
[20-51] years) presented with acute onset of marked chest pain within 4 days
after receipt of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. All military members were previously
healthy with a high level of fitness. Seven received the BNT162b2-mRNA vaccine
and 16 received the mRNA-1273 vaccine. A total of 20 patients had symptom onset
following the second dose of an appropriately spaced 2-dose series. All
patients had significantly elevated cardiac troponin levels. Among 8 patients
who underwent cardiac magnetic resonance imaging within the acute phase of
illness, all had findings consistent with the clinical diagnosis of
myocarditis. Additional testing did not identify other etiologies for
myocarditis, including acute COVID-19 and other infections, ischemic injury, or
underlying autoimmune conditions. All patients received brief supportive care
and were recovered or recovering at the time of this report. The military
administered more than 2.8 million doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in this
period. While the observed number of myocarditis cases was small, the number
was higher than expected among male military members after a second vaccine
dose
Did Pfizer Fail to Perform industry Standard Animal Testing?
Recently, there has been speculation regarding potential safety signals associated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Many different unusual, prolonged, or delayed reactions have been reported, and often these are more pronounced after the second shot. Women have reported changes in menstruation after taking mRNA vaccines. Problems with blood clotting (coagulation) – which are also common during COVID-19 disease – are also reported.
Among the most critical tests, which must be performed prior to testing any drug or vaccines in a human being, is whether it can cause mutations in the DNA (genotoxicity), or whether it could cause problems with cells or tissues of the reproductive tract – including ovaries (reproductive toxicity). In the case of the Pfizer COVID mRNA vaccine, these newly revealed documents raise additional questions about both the genotoxicity and reproductive toxicity risks of this product. Standard studies designed to assess these risks were not performed in compliance with accepted empirical research standards. Furthermore, in key studies designed to test whether the vaccine remains near the injection site or travels throughout the body, Pfizer did not even use the commercial vaccine (BNT162b2) but instead relied on a “surrogate” mRNA producing the luciferase protein.
These new disclosures seem to indicate that the U.S. and other governments are conducting a massive vaccination program with an incompletely characterized experimental vaccine... People are now receiving injections with an mRNA gene therapy-based vaccine, which produces the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in their cells, and the vaccine may be also delivering the mRNA and producing spike protein in unintended organs and tissues (which may include ovaries).
....
The current mRNA vaccines are theorized to act locally in draining lymphoid tissue. Formulated lipid nanoparticles that contain mRNA able to produce the spike protein are syringe injected into a muscle such as the deltoid (shoulder muscle). Once the injection occurs, the muscle cells near the injection site are impacted by the mRNA-based vaccine (e.g. the lipid nanoparticles), while much of the dose moves into the intracellular fluid surrounding the muscle cells and consequently drains to lymph nodes. According to this theory, a properly functioning mRNA-based vaccine is delivered into and drives production of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein in muscle and lymph node cells. The cells then produce the Spike protein, which is then moved to the surface of these cells where it becomes attached.
The foreign virus Spike protein then triggers the immune system to recognize and attack any cell in the body that is either infected by SARS-CoV-2 or has Spike protein on its surface. The vaccine was designed so that the Spike protein is affixed via a transmembrane anchor region, so that it cannot circulate around the body via the bloodstream. The same general scenario applies to all mRNA-based vaccines as well as recombinant adenoviral vectored vaccines (such as the J&J vaccine) designed to use gene-therapy technology to express Spike protein in cells and tissues. This general strategy is designed to reduce the risk that any residual vaccine dose that does somehow end up in the bloodstream (or organs and tissues) ends up not being a safety risk due to unintended biologic effects.
Spike protein will remain affixed to cell surfaces, and therefore is not released into the blood where circulating Spike might cause problems by binding to its natural target, ACE-2 receptors. However, any cell that has Spike protein (or protein fragments) anchored on its membrane or displayed on MHC antigen-presenting molecules becomes a target for vaccine-activated immune cells and antibodies, which would then attack, damage or kill those cells in the same way that SARS-CoV-2 virus-infected cells would be attacked. In other words, if very active mRNA delivery particles or recombinant adenoviral-vectored vaccines spread throughout the body, the resulting production of the vaccine antigen (Spike, in this case) will both stimulate immunity and also cause those same cells to be attacked by the immune system. If this actually happens, the resulting “vaccine reactogenicity” could resemble clinical symptoms seen with autoimmune syndromes.
New Study Finds
COVID-19 'Very Well Adapted' To Specifically Infect Humans
An Australian team of
researchers has published a new study which found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus
which causes COVID-19, appears to be specifically adapted to attack human
cells, according to the Daily Telegraph.
COVID Quotes of the Week:
I had many baffling conversations with people I highly respect for their scientific capabilities all throughout 2020 that showed very weird lack of knowledge of the problem. But it is really bad now — all the cognitive biases are on full display. “Science” has saved the day and “we”, as in “scientists”, i.e. our perceived in-group, have triumphed, so what could be wrong and how could there be a problem?”
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
Have the Great
Reset Technocrats Really Thought This Through? Evil: Between Depopulation &
Neuralink.
… Had their plans not been
rooted in evil, they would have used soft-power tactics like manufacturing
consent, to arrive at their ends.
The aim of the Great Reset
is to transition the ruling plutocratic oligarchy into a technocratic one. The
basis of plutocracy is finance, and the introduction of AI and automation
eliminates the basis for finance as the foundation of an economy of scale. This
is because automation and deflation move in tandem, making new technologies net
losers. Therefore a new paradigm accounting for this post-financial ‘Fourth
Industrial Revolution’, must be introduced.
Kunstler: Stumbling Toward
Reality
It’s the opinion of some —
though not myself — that the Covid-19 episode was unleashed upon the world to
allow “the elite” to execute a “controlled demolition of the global economy” so
as quash climate change (by reducing carbon emissions), and therefore ensure a
brighter future for said elite, while cruelly throwing the rest of the world’s
population overboard. Oh, I dunno…. Klaus Schwab and his minions of The Great
Reset seem more like hapless control freaks than persons actually able to
control anything, least of all the whole world. Dr. Fauci’s role looks like a
species of generic egomania with a top hat of greed (considering his financial
interests in vaccines). The reality is that the global economy, such as it’s a
high-tech industrial economy, is shooting its own wad very nicely without a
whole lot of assistance from alleged nefarious parties.
Hopkins: The War on
Reality
This state of affairs, in
which two contradictory, mutually-exclusive realities exist, is … well, it’s
impossible, and so it cannot continue. Either there exists a devastating global
pandemic that justifies a global “state of emergency,” the suspension of
constitutional rights, and the other totalitarian “emergency measures” we have
been subjected to since March of 2020 or there isn’t. It really is as simple as
that.
Except that it isn’t as
simple as that. It is easy to forget, given the last 16 months, that people
have been bitterly divided, and inhabiting mutually-exclusive realities, and
regarding people who don’t conform to their realities as enemies for the last
five years. I’m not talking about political disagreements, or even
socio-cultural differences. I’m talking about contradictory realities. Things
that actually happened, or didn’t happen. Things that exist, or do not exist.
…
But just imagine, for a
moment, if that were the case … if what determined reality was actually just a
question of power rather than facts. Imagine that reality was just a concept
that we used to mark the current limits of our knowledge and ideological
beliefs.
GeoPolitical Fare:
Greenwald: Biden's Lawless
Bombing of Iraq and Syria Only Serves the Weapons Industry Funding Both Parties
"The price of power." Our creeping isolation.
It is remarkable how quickly the Biden administration is acquiring its
stamp — the watermark it will leave on our parchment when it is done. This will
be made of isolation and delusion, in my read. I conclude this partly because
of what President Biden and his people have done in the four months since
assuming the executive branch, and partly because of Biden’s moment in the long
story of America’s rise and decline in the post–1945 era.
Let us consider this moment in an historical context. Hard as it is to
see one’s present as a passage in history, let us try, even as the living are
too close to the present to accomplish this without conscious effort.
A string of events, chief among them lately the Navalny nonsense, the
U.S.–cultivated tensions on Ukraine’s border with Russia this past spring, and
the HMS Defender’s purposely provocative intrusion into Russian waters off
Crimea last week: It is now plain that the U.S. (by way of the ever-supine U.K.
in the Defender case) simply does not want a settled relationship with the
Russian Federation for the foreseeable future.
The rest of America’s traditional allies do, as Emmanuel Macron and
Angela Merkel made plain last week, when the French and German leaders proposed
a European Union summit with President Vladimir Putin — an implicit reply to
the Biden summit with one of Europe’s own. It was the Poles and the Baltics, ever suffering from post–Soviet stress
disorder, who shot down the idea.
It is the same across the Pacific: With the single exception of the
Australians, who have not thought for themselves since MI6 and the CIA
conspired to depose Gough Whitlam in 1975, nobody in East Asia wants to join
the U.S. in some kind of confrontation with China inspired by game theory and
other such Strangelovian procedures. This holds, once again, for core Europe
and also for America’s traditional allies in East Asia — including, I must add,
the almost-always supine Japanese.
This is what I mean by isolation.
One need not range far to find evidence of America’s mounting delusions.
…
I am not here to tell you that policies the rest of the world does not
like, and our illusions as to our spotless virtue as we make our hypocritical
way in the world, are anything new. Hardly is this so. But they come now at a
critical moment in world history. This is what makes Biden’s arrival at the
White House so significant.
Biden and his national security people had a choice on Inauguration Day.
Other recent presidents have had it, too, but for none has it been so sharply
defined. I have wondered ever since whether Biden & Co. understood this and
consciously made the wrong one, or whether they were not even capable of
understanding a choice had to be made.
Geopolitics,
Profit, and Poppies: How the CIA Turned Afghanistan into a Failed Narco-State
The war in Afghanistan has looked a lot like the war on drugs in Latin America
and previous colonial campaigns in Asia, with a rapid militarization of the
area and the empowerment of pliant local elites
Stop Attacking
Our Woke Masters of War!
As Jodi Melamed of Marquette University explains in Represent and
Destroy, it is precisely the official civil rights statutes on the American
books as well as the mass media's shallow embrace of "diversity" and
multiculturalism -- along with corporate-funded academia's complicit production
of an elite black managerial-political class -- that paradoxically gives cover
to the global racist predations of the American Imperium. The US political
system has been able to "capture" the energy of 60s and 70s social
movements and then cynically put it to work for capitalism and international
conquest.
Orwellian Fare:
Steve Keen: Free Julian
Assange
A Remarkable
Silence: Media Blackout After Key Witness Against Assange Admits Lying
As we have pointed out since Media Lens began in 2001, a fundamental
feature of corporate media is propaganda by omission. Over the past week, a
stunning example has highlighted this core property once again. A major witness
in the US case against Julian Assange has just admitted fabricating key accusations
in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder.
Assange
Prosecution Relied On False Testimony From A Diagnosed Sociopath And Convicted
Pedophile
This major witness would be Iceland’s Sigurdur “Sigi” Thordarson, a paid
FBI informant who after his short-lived association with WikiLeaks has been
found guilty of sexually abusing nine boys as well as embezzlement, fraud, and
theft in his home country. A court-appointed psychologist has found him to be a
sociopath.
Evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein is a modern-day Popper…. Why are
Weinstein and Heying so dangerous to the orthodoxy? Throughout the Covid
crisis, they have considered alternative views. They were among the first to
consider the hypothesis that the virus was manufactured. They have considered
Ivermectin treatments. Now they are considering the evidence that Covid
vaccines are more dangerous than political authorities, the media, and their
anointed experts are portraying. Importantly, they have not hesitated to
question the integrity of officials such as Dr. Facui.
Consider Weinstein’s Popperian assertion that “a movement opposes science
when it doesn’t want assertions tested, challenges arithmetic when its claims
don’t add up, ridicules ‘merit’ when it wants to triumph by other means, seeks
to censor when it fears discussion.”
Weinstein adds, “Those who coddle such demands sow the seeds of our
undoing.” Censorship means risking our economies and our lives.
CaitOz Quotes of the Week(s):
1- Almost all good business
practices are terrible human being practices. To be a good businessman
you have to harden the humanity out of you. This is why capitalism creates and
elevates terrible humans, and why we are being led into extinction by assholes.
2- The powerful people who’ve been poisoning our world with ecocide,
oppression, exploitation and war clearly believe they’ll be able to ride this
radical transformation and remain in power with the status quo perfectly
intact; if they didn’t believe this the internet would’ve been shut down before
it even got off the ground. But I don’t see how they can stay in control of
this headlong plunge into rapidly expanding consciousness we’re experiencing;
harnessing the forces that are at play here would be like trying to surf on a
tsunami, like trying to hang glide through a tornado.
There are aspects of humanity which the CIA doesn’t understand, which the
plutocrats can’t control, which the manipulators can’t anticipate. Something is brewing here,
and we’re almost at the boiling point. I don’t know if it will be
enough to save us from all the existential hurdles our species faces in the
near future; I just know that we are rapidly becoming a conscious species, and
consciousness and dysfunction cannot coexist. We won’t need to wait long to
find out which one wins out.
3- And that’s just pretty darn
convenient for the powerful, is it not? Assuming other mainstream
news outlets feel the same, this means they’re all generally following the lead
of just a handful of top-tier publications like The New York Times, The
Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. If just those few outlets
decide to ignore a major news story that’s inconvenient for the powerful
(either by persuasion, infiltration or by their own initiative), then no one
else will either. As far as the media-consuming public is concerned, it’s like
the major news story never happened at all.
4- There’s been criticism as
well, of course; online sentiments about Rumsfeld’s death
have not been nearly as worshipful and hagiographic as they’ve been toward
other disgusting war whores like John McCain. But in the end all that matters
is that he lived a long, full life, without ever having faced
even the slightest single consequence for the horrors he unleashed upon our
world; without even so much as sustaining any meaningful damage to his
reputation. … When we are little, we are taught that we live in a nation of
laws, where bad guys are thrown in prison by the good guys who are in charge of
things. Because our mental programming continues for the rest of our lives in
the form of mass-scale propaganda designed to manufacture consent for the
status quo, most of us tend to hold onto this childish model of the world to
some extent throughout adulthood. In reality, exactly zero percent of the
world’s worst people are in prison, but some of the best people are. The fact
that Donald Rumsfeld lived a long life of freedom while Julian Assange wastes
away in Belmarsh Prison proves the world doesn’t work the way we were taught in
school. The very worst bad guys are not put in prison by the
good guys who run things, because the very worst bad guys are the ones who run
things. The system isn’t designed to protect us from society’s worst, it’s
designed to protect society’s worst from us.
…
Unless we can purge from our cells everything within
us that resembles Donald Rumsfeld, there is no future for Homo sapiens on this
planet. We must evolve beyond everything he stood for, as individuals, as a
society, and as a species, and move into a peaceful and collaborative
relationship with each other and with our ecosystem.
Other Quotes of the Week(s):
Presidents lie – it goes
with the job. If Biden lied about the U.S.’s role in innumerable
coups and regime changes, one can only wonder what else he is lying about.
Kunstler1: Who knew that reality
could become such a squishy thing in the USA? But such are the agonies of a
collapsing society that it becomes ever harder to know what’s real, especially
with factions in power intent on gaslighting, manipulating, obfuscating, and
coercing the raw material of public opinion, which is: what has actually
happened in the past and what is happening now.
Kunstler2: Events are tending toward
an unfortunate convergence that may leave the USA in a very reduced condition
before the end of this year, while the “Joe Biden” government cripples all our
institutions, especially the military, with race-and-gender
mind-fuckery as a distraction from its own coming and untoward collapse.
W.J. Astore: But that was then and this
is now and the Biden administration, joining the previous Trump and Obama
administrations, is “investing” up to $1.7 trillion over the next thirty years
in more nuclear weapons to destroy the earth. It’s a job-creator, don’t you
know.
Mainly, I’m an introvert
through and through. And like many introverts, I can do that
performative thing of turning on the charm and being sociable and seeming like
a “normal member of society,” but what you don’t see is how post-performance I
am but a husk of a human. The recharge time is slow and vast.
Welsh: As for the West, I am in mourning. I love the coast; the rain
forests dripping with water, the ferns looking like jewels in the dew, the deep
dark forests where decaying leaves soften each step and old tees shelter you as
you walk. Much of that is going to go away; future generations along most of
the West coast will never know the beauty and ease of the temperate rain
forest. For this and many other crimes, those who chose to do nothing about
climate change are guilty. We are losing so much, and will lose so much more,
that should never have been at risk. Some of what will go is no loss, mostly
human things. But the animals and plants did nothing to deserve this, and my
sorrow is even more for them than the humans who will suffer.
Taleb: “What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.”
Other Fare:
Welsh: Canada Day, Canada’s Shame
Big Thoughts:
Doomberg: The Work of My
Life: June 2021 Report
Pics of the Week:
Mapped: Global
Happiness Levels in 2021
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