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Sunday, March 20, 2022

2022-03-20

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

Regular Fare:


One of my basic theses about modern capitalism is that since 2008, the major capitalist economies have been in what I call a Long Depression.  In my book of 2016 of the same name, I distinguish between what economists call recessions or slumps in production, investment and employment; and depressions.  Under the capitalist mode of production (ie production for profit appropriated from human labour (power) by a small group of owners of the means of production), there have been regular and recurring slumps every 8-10 years since the early 19th century.  After each slump, capitalist production revives and expands for several years, before slipping back into a new slump. 

However, depressions are different.  Instead of coming out of a slump, capitalist economies stay depressed with lower output, investment and employment growth than before for a longish period.

There have been three such depressions in capitalism: the first was in the late 19th century in the US and Europe, lasting more or less from about 1873 to 1897, depending on the country.  During that long depression, there were short periods of upswing but also a succession of slumps.  Overall, output and investment growth remained much weaker than in the previous expansion period of 1850-73. 

The second depression was the so-called Great Depression lasting from 1929-1941 up to WW2, mainly in the US and Europe, but also in Asia and South America. 

The third depression began after the Global Financial Crash of 2007-8 and the ensuing Great Recession of 2008-9.  This depression (as defined) lasted for a decade up to 2019 until it seemed that the major economies were not only growing much more slowly than before 2007, but were heading into an outright slump. 

...... The Long Depression of the 21st century may have begun in 2009, but the economic forces that caused it were underway as early as 1997 onwards.  It was then that the average rate of profit on capital in the major capitalist economies began to fall and, despite some small bursts of recovery (mainly driven by economic slumps and huge credit injections), the profitability of capital remains near all-time lows. 

Profit drives investment in capitalism; and so falling and low profitability has led to slow growth in productive investment.  Instead, capitalist institutions have increasingly speculated in financial assets in the fantasy world of stock and bond markets and cryptocurrencies. ...

So far, there is little sign that capitalism can get out of this Long Depression, even if the current Ukraine disaster is resolved.  To end the depression would require a cleansing of the economic system through a slump that liquidates the zombie companies that reduce profitability and productivity growth and increase debt burdens. 



Recession risk is rising rapidly. In fact, it is possible that we may already be in one.

While such a claim may sound impossible, given that Q4-GDP was above 5% in terms of annualized growth, such would not be the first time such a turn occurred.

.... While the interventions certainly salvaged the economy from a more prolonged recessionary event, they also made the economy more fragile. Furthermore, by dragging forward future consumption, the interventions only gave the appearance of economic activity. As that liquidity reverses, and assuming interventions don’t repeat, the economy will reverse course rapidly. Such is already evident in the Atlanta Fed’s GDP forecast for Q1-2022.





It is hard work being an economist. Especially when about 90 per cent of what one reads each day is fiction masquerading as truth. That wouldn’t be so bad because fiction is good when it is in the right place. But in this context, the fiction that comes out from economists and their lackeys in the financial media causes massive damage to innocent citizens

...... 

He [Powell] was asked about the use of the term ‘transitory’.

He said: 
We tend to use … [the word transitory] … to mean that it won’t leave a permanent mark in the form of higher inflation … I think it’s probably a good time to retire that word and try to explain more clearly what we mean … factors pushing inflation upward will linger well into next year.
Those factors relate to “supply chain issues” and now the Ukrainian invasion.

As I have noted previously – transitory – does not necessarily have a temporal dimension to it. It just means as long as the special circumstances prevail.

That is what the Federal Reserve Chairman was referring to rather than conceding that inflation was now institutionised and running out of control (‘exploding’).



... Such issues have led to markets predicting this.
Rates traders are now pricing in a full seven Fed rate hikes by the end of this year. ( @lisaabramowicz1 )
Listeners to my podcast will know that I think that this is both silly ( if you believe more interest-rate increases are required then do more now) and not especially likely if we look at debt costs and the extra Covid debt we piled up. But my purpose today is to look at something which is these days more important than short-term interest-rates which is bond yields or short-term ones.

You do not need to take my word for it as the central bankers proved it post credit crunch as they piled into QE bond buying. The reason for that was that cutting short-term interest-rates was a disappointment in terms of the effect and along the way another fail for their economic models.

..... So we find ourselves with higher bond yields but still historically low ones. You may note I have avoided mentioning real yields and that is because they are effectively meaningless now as we look at yields of 2% or so and inflation nudging 8%.

The real issue for me is stagflation and whether our central bankers will keep up their new anti-inflation rhetoric should the economy weaken? Personally I doubt it. Things are very volatile right now and in the face of inflation around 8% it seems out of phase but we may be nearing a top for bond yields.


COVID bailouts helped politically connected businesses more than others – new research


A million new millionaires were created in U.S. last year, and the richest got richer, report says



Other Charts: (source links: one & two, )






Bubble Fare:


Rule #1 of Japanification: Stimulus is everything...

... The first rule of Japanification is that economic "reflation" is entirely dependent upon continued dramatic fiscal and monetary policy. Which means there will never be another "normalization" of policy, under the current deflationary paradigm. Which is what today's errant policy-makers are now attempting. 

Their failure will be cataclysmic at the zero bound. 

The COVID pandemic was the most deflationary event in modern world history. The first ever TOTAL lockdown of the global economy. Zero international travel, and work from home on a scale never previously even technologically possible. It was the apex of ecommerce and Amazon. It was the full scale realization of cloud computing. It was a "virtual economy". 

.... In summary, the entire pandemic was a sucker's rally at the end of the cycle, sold to the usual bagholders by the usual psychopaths. 

Next stop, hard landing at the zero bound.



We are at the brink of the fastest demand collapse in history. It's already beginning in Asia and Europe and will soon spread to the rest of the world. The Fed just reduced liquidity in an already illiquid market. ..

No, they don't see it coming. Read any pundit today and all they talk about is "stagflation". However, stagflation was a very rare occurrence that happened only in the late 1970s when the middle class was at its peak. It meant slow growth and inflation, but not recession. The critical assumption is that this Fed will allow inflation to persist when they've already taken steps to ensure that it does not. This Fed is actively pushing the economy into recession in order to squash wage inflation. That's all this is about. Everything else is just background noise. Why? Because the Fed ASSUMES they can manage a soft landing into recession. And that is the lethal assumption. They are pushing the economy towards a liquidity trap. Both in terms of market liquidity which has already collapsed and in terms of economic liquidity.

"A liquidity trap is a contradictory economic situation in which interest rates are very low and savings rates are high, rendering monetary policy ineffective"

From an economic standpoint, monetary policy is now officially ineffective. Yes the Fed can expand their balance sheet, but they won't be able to offset economic demand collapse. This is officially a larger policy error than what took place in September 2008, because back then the Fed had several percentage points of Fed rate to lower. 

Bear in mind that the bond market has been warning of THIS risk all along. There was not one moment even during maximum fiscal and monetary stimulus where the bond market believed that inflation was a long-term threat. Pundits claim that at this same level of CPI the Fed rate should be at 13% as it was in 1980. Imagine if even the 10 year yield was at 8% which is 4x the current level. If that happened global asset markets would be a smoking crater right now. Comparing this period to 1980 is asinine, yet almost everyone is doing it right now. 

As it is the bond market is already warning of recession after ONE rate hike:

This is the Five/Ten yield curve - most inverted since the 2007 recession began.



COVID-19 notes:

WHO says global rise in COVID cases is 'tip of the iceberg'





Patients recovered from COVID-19 have lower general cognition compared to healthy controls up to 7 months post-infection.


Severe COVID-19 tied to long-term depression, anxiety



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Now Lyme Timber CEO Jim Hourdequin wants to fix a broken system to create a market that actually helps slow climate change.


Arctic temperatures could approach the melting point as they surge nearly 50 degrees above normal







Other / Fun Fare:

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is

When did it become as hard to imagine what a good—or at least not as bad—internet might look like as to picture a world without the internet at all? Social-media mobs, conspiratorial thinking, deadly disinformation campaigns, gadget addiction, the funk of mass attention-deficit disorder: World-Wide-Web woes comprise a growth economy. The less acute but vague unease of our encounter with digital technology isn’t much alleviated by the possibility of imagining a truly off-the-grid alternative. (That a bit of shorthand like “off the grid” exists to describe a break from tech is as much a symptom of the problem as anything.) Perhaps to say that we feel backed into a corner by a claque of devices of our own making is not really to say much of anything at all.

.... Little of what we ascribe to the experience of the internet is genuinely novel. Smith outlines what he considers a true departure with the birth of a new sort of extraction economy driven not by natural resources but by the “countless little nibbles of individual human attention” that feed it. This emerging extractive economy is a true threat to how we make use of attention, and never before has so much of what we do—our pleasures, our jobs, our daily correspondence, our dirtiest secrets—been concentrated in “a single device . . . a portal for the conduct of nearly every kind of human life today.” This condensation only intensifies the effects of attention extraction.


An anti-universe running backwards in time could explain dark matter and cosmic inflation.




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:



The neoliberal economy was supposed to bring about a utopian world order. Instead, it gave us crippling psychological stress and social breakdown. How can we ever recover?

If you’re unlucky enough to reside in a town where data centers house computer servers storing everything from financial data for giant corporations to military secrets, you’re likely to find that a loud, whining noise becomes life’s agonizing background. The sound peaks and subsides, but it’s always there, never allowing you to fully relax. Eventually, the stress of this kind of ambient noise can wear you down, doubling your risk of mental illness, as well as increasing your risk of diseases like heart attack and stroke.

Living in an economy dominated by neoliberal principles can feel kind of like that: a background hum of constant psychological stress.

The sense of precariousness never really goes away. Instead collectively of sharing the risks of life, we’re increasingly saddled with the heavy burdens of existing in an overwhelmingly complex, modern world. We’re lonely individuals, fighting to stay afloat no matter what our situation. There are a few lucky winners, sure (and even many of them are psychically damaged), but most of us are forced to battle in an unrelenting struggle and competition for rewards. Hunger games, status games, power games, the list goes on and on.

....................... You begin to understand that you don’t have much agency in the world. Life feels precarious, and that is exactly what neoliberals intended because they believed that living in such a state was necessary to “discipline” people to accept their place in a world ruled by capitalists.

..... So what’s the alternative? Let’s begin by stating the obvious. A sane society is not run for the economic benefit of a few wealthy capitalists. That is a sick society, and we are living proof of it.

Since the 1980s, we’ve been trained to think of this psychologically crippling state of affairs as normal, when it’s actually anything but.



All things considered, it’s not surprising that working in a modern corporate environment would have roughly the same impact on the body and mind as belonging to a dysfunctional religious cult. There’s the same entrenched culture of abuse and exploitation, not to mention the same pervasive gaslighting—the constant insistence on the part of the people who have power over you that the abuse and exploitation you experience aren’t real, that everyone belongs to one happy team, and if you don’t like what’s being done to you, it’s your fault and you need to improve your attitude. It makes all the sense in the world that the inmates of any such system would end up with serious mental and physical health consequences as a result.

.... We need to consider the possibility, in other words, that a great many people in today’s industrial world have taken so much psychological damage from the constant maltreatment meted out to them by modern corporate culture that all they can do is keep stumbling blindly ahead from day to day. That would certainly go a long way to explain the way that our societies have been doing the same thing on a collective level, lurching forward mindlessly toward one preventable disaster after another:  it’s because too few people have the mental resources left to do anything else.

... Thus I think it’s worth suggesting that there’s room for a rebirth of imagination in contemporary industrial societies—and one of the themes that it might focus on first and foremost is the sphere of political economy.

I insist on those latter two words, by the way. One of the reasons that economics has become such a reliable source of bad advice over the last century or so is that it neglects half its original subject matter. The science that Adam Smith founded, and that so many other thinkers pursued in his wake, was properly called political economy, because it dealt with the relationship between wealth and power. That turned out to be too explosive a mix for the comfort of the privileged, and so in the early twentieth century political economy was chopped in half. The bleeding fragments got turned into the half-sciences of economics and political science, which have spouted twin plumes of comforting nonsense ever since.

The system of political economy in most of the industrial world these days is neoliberal corporate capitalism.  Each of those words has a specific meaning.  It’s capitalism because the means of production and distribution are owned by people who have large amounts of financial capital; it’s corporate because the corporation—an imaginary legal person with more rights and fewer responsibilities than the rest of us—is the structural mechanism by which capitalists exert their ownership; and it’s neoliberal because it demands, and usually gets, legal arrangements that place the rights and profits of corporations ahead of the rights and interests of nations and the people who live in them.

It’s not a very good system, unless you happen to belong to the 5% or so of the population of industrial nations who profit mightily from it, or the 15% or so who receive more benefits than costs from their participation in it. Since the late 1970s, however, the corporate media across the industrial world has loved to insist that neoliberal corporate capitalism is the only possible system nowadays—that, in the words Margaret Thatcher made infamous, “there is no alternative.” Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “An End To History?” gave that claim a veneer of philosophical respectability, borrowing Hegel’s logic to claim that history consists of the struggle between competing systems of political economy, neoliberal corporate capitalism won, and therefore history is over and we have no choice but to put up with the current status quo forever.

Hegel’s name is worth noting here, though not for the reasons Fukuyama had in mind. It’s a curious fact of the history of ideas that all the most dysfunctional ideologies of modern times have Hegel’s stamp on them. Fascism is a good example

...................... The most thoroughly worked out system of distributist thought so far is the work of E.F. Schumacher, the dissident economist whose book Small is Beautiful has been discussed at length in some of my past series of blog posts and was a central inspiration to my book The Wealth of Nature. Schumacher argued that modern economics is such a steaming mess because it ignores every bit of evidence that fails to support the “greed is good” school of mindless excess. He warned of the impending energy crisis long before it arrived.  

......... Social credit was founded by a British economist and engineer, Major C.H. Douglas, who focused on the role of debt and credit in generating the wildly unbalanced distribution of wealth in capitalist societies. He noted, and proved by extensive studies, that the vast majority of businesses pay out less in wages, salaries, and dividends than the value of the goods and services they produce; as a result, it’s mathematically impossible for consumers to buy everything the economy produces without running up unpayable debt—and that’s where you get economic crises. There’s a great deal of theory, but a very rough sketch of the practical consequences is that under social credit, banking is a public utility rather than a for-profit industry.  Money is recognized as a system of tokens rather than a commodity, and is issued directly by the government rather than by issuing bonds. (Do we really want to have the government paying rich people for the privilege of issuing its own currency?  That’s what today’s system of money creation via debt amounts to.)


The media outlets which spread this lie from ex-CIA officials never retracted their pre-election falsehoods, ones used by Big Tech to censor reporting on the front-runner.


"Twenty years later, none of the those responsible for the CIA's heinous regime of torture were ever prosecuted," lamented Rep. Ilhan Omar. "Instead they got promotions."


In “Sickening,” Harvard professor John Abramson chronicles the deceptive marketing practices of the drug industry.



Unsustainability Fare:

Why putting people before profit is crucial in the battle to save our planet





Related Tweets:

Jacobson: If a genie granted their wish for the world to convert 100% to green energy today and end fossil fuels completely, the planet would immediately heat up by 0.5°C to 1.1°C (IPCC estimate) due to the aerosol masking effect and loss of sulfates, expediting the 6th great extinction.



COVID Fare:

I've continued to come across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Joey Smalley (aka Metatron) and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; new addition: Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut on twitter; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts

Analysis:


Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia, argue these authors

... through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products



.... But I am not writing this Substack to talk too much about the implications or effects. That’s what the papers are for. I am writing this today to document the fact that there were NO genotoxicity or carcinogencinity studies done in the context of the COVID-19 modified RNA LNP-based products during pre-market testing. Why, you ask?

Because the genetic material and the fats were not expected to have genotoxic, carcinogenic or tumorigenic potential.

Oh ok, and cigarettes were not expected to promote lung cancer and thalidomide was not expected to deform babies and the rotavirus vaccine was not expected to cause intussusception and combined MMR vaccine was not expected to cause autism if given to babies before 18 months of life. Should I go on?

Besides, the World Health Organization (WHO) establishment assures us (in 2005 - wasn’t that 17 years ago?) that “Carcinogenicity testing is generally not considered necessary to support the development and licensure of vaccine products for infectious diseases (WHO, 2005).”

Oh yeah? What about IM-injectable mRNA-LNP-based products? Maybe you should update your policy to include injectable products for infectious diseases based on mRNA-LNP platforms? Maybe?

One word. OUTDATED. That above quote may apply in the context of conventional vaccines but not in the context of genetic-material-based cytotoxic membrane-disrupting fat bubble delivery systems. These COVID-19 injectable products are NOT vaccines by the WHO’s own definition. These products not only should have been tested for both genotoxicity and carcinogenicity but they must be. These are gene-based experimental products that use fat bubbles whose components include known cytotoxic cationic6 lipids. Just to repeat myself. It is deplorable and inexplicable to me that this has gone so far.

People ask me all the time how to start a conversation with people defending this asininity. Tell them the products were not tested to determine if they cause cancer - not in animal models, and not in humans. The genetic components were not ruled out as mutagens and the lipids were not ruled out as toxic. And the reason they were not tested by our trusted ‘authorities’ was because they ‘aren’t meant to cause cancer’ because vaccines based on the conventional model of killed or attenuated pathogens don’t tend to be mutagenic. Outdated byes!

These products are called ‘vaccines’ but they based on a completely different model - a completely different platform and delivery system, so they cannot be deemed non-mutagenic until proven otherwise with studies. And show your people this. You can quote me.



The infamous UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report started as a great tool by the vaccinators to showcase incredible successes of Covid Vaxx. But, as time went on, success was no longer in the cards, and the reports displayed grimmer and grimmer failure of vaccines in the UK. As I said many times, the bad news from the UK in no way should be interpreted as the UK being somehow a bad country. To the contrary, the UK had an amazing statistical agency that (up until now) honestly reported the goings in the vaxxed world. Finally, it seems, just as Scotland did, the UK will discontinue case reports by vaccination status. 

... What they are trying to hide is that the pandemic among the unvaccinated is essentially over, whereas it is just getting started among the boosted.


Commentary:


For the first months of the pandemic, I was a Corona hysteric. I had the virus very early; for four days I was extremely sick, and as I recovered and Europe began to lock down, I read the panic pornography of Tomas Pueyo and thought we might well be facing a mass casualty event. Everything reinforced this message, from obscure Twitter accounts to colleagues to German state media. There were critics too, but in those early days it was hard to find them. Those who came to my notice turned out to be saying a lot of things that were just wrong, and in this way they played into the hands of the containment regime. It was easy for casual readers to think that sanity and good judgement lay entirely with Team Lockdown.

I found Berenson’s Twitter account in mid-March. I didn’t agree with him most of the time, but it was clear to me that he was more than just another crank. He had a way of pointing out simple facts that nobody in the press wanted to talk about, and – more importantly – that you didn’t realise nobody was talking about. Totalising media discourse has a way of appearing seamless and comprehensive even when it’s not, and it can be very hard to get outside of it. When Neil Ferguson published his panic model on 16 March, for example, I was pretty sure it was propagandist nonsense. (Even in my hystericist days I was never that far gone.)

............ Of course, it would be unfair to probe the limitations of a book, without also noting its strengths. Berenson’s discussion of masks and the policies surrounding them has been one of his strongest points, both here and on Twitter. I (and I suspect others) at first tended to avoid this issue, because we thought it was important to concentrate energy on the more dire issues of mass closures and house arrests. I’m now convinced this was the wrong approach. You can’t read Pandemia without wondering whether masks might be the Achilles heel of the whole Corona complex. Their use has no basis in evidence, and yet mask mandates are defended by the entire establishment, who invoke a nebulous ‘science’ that nobody can ever quite call into being.

...... Probably nobody important in his lifetime will acknowledge it, but Berenson’s calm, rational, and diligent reporting has been crucial to breaking the spell of Corona in the West. Voices like his will only get more important in the coming decades. Corona is ending, but I very much fear that the crazy is just getting started.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Corrigan: I don’t think most people grasp the absurdity of what just happened. Without knowing the consequences, an infinitesimally small minority of people chose to gamble with the fate of the entire human race with a new technology that had no more than 2 months of data on 20,000 people.


Bhattacharya: On the one hand there is the Swiss chees model, which justifies almost any intervention (like plexiglass) on the basis of even low quality evidence. On the other hand there is evidence based medicine, which demands the highest quality evidence. Public health chose Swiss cheese.


Kelly Brown: (1/2) Canadian insurer Sun Life also experienced "significantly higher than expected mortality in the working age population" in its US group life business in Q4 (w/more expected into 2022).


Coquin de Chien: Everyone has a moral obligation to others to ensure that the vaccinations are not mandated, if they know that some will die somewhere at some time. Remaining quiet is a negative act of accessory to the atrocity. Going along to get along in order to maintain social group status or employment or another convenience is immoral. If you know it’s a death lottery, you are obligated to speak out against it and support those refusing it.


Grimes: Why can't we sue for the discrimination happening still federally in Canada against the unvaccinated. Why can't  we get an emergency hearing instead of September? Why are they not forced to defend the science, which they won't be able to do. Why is there nothing we can do?


response: Thomas Czerniawski 
Inside the genome of COVID-19 is a 19-nt long nucleotide chain that exists nowhere else in viral nature. It also exists in a set of 2015 Moderna patents.
If only you knew how bad things really were.
18.2 million dead. And counting. The trackers are all inaccurate. They don't count the indirect kills.
10,736,322,646 "vaccine" doses administered.
How do you conceal a genocide?



CO-VIDs of the Week:

Koen: We should probably put this guy in charge for the next pandemic.

"And it really makes sense. Only it doesn't work"
How lockdowns are like the strategy during the Battle of the Somme


full vid here:



Pushback Fare:

Data scientist files internal appeal of Bank of Canada’s mandatory vaccination policy

Dr. Joseph Hickey, a data scientist at the Bank of Canada (Canada’s central bank) was placed on unpaid leave without benefits by his employer in November 2021, for declining to receive injections of a COVID-19 vaccine.

On March 16, 2022, Dr. Hickey submitted an internal appeal of the Bank’s decision. His 766-page submission describes and cites the scientific evidence that demonstrates there are many medical reasons for declining vaccination, including that:
  • There was no emergency that caused large amounts of deaths in Canada in 2020-2021 that would justify vaccinating the entire population;
  • There is no reliable evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine products provide any health benefit;
  • Vaccine products injected via intramuscular routes are in-effect physiologically incapable of preventing infection and transmission of respiratory illnesses;
  • There is autopsy, surveillance, and statistical evidence of grave dangers of COVID-19 vaccine products;
  • There are more than 1000 peer-reviewed articles providing evidence of harm from COVID-19 vaccine products;
  • There is a significantly increased risk of dangerous heart inflammation following injection with a COVID-19 vaccine product, especially for younger males, and this danger is heightened for those who engage in strenuous physical activity;
  • Natural immunity provides robust and sufficient protection against respiratory illnesses; and
  • It is a fundamental principle of medicine that individual assessment of risk is a personal and confidential choice and the decision to receive or not receive a medical intervention must be made with free and informed consent.
A copy of the submission can be read at the link here.





COVID Conspiracy Fare:


This book is a brilliant and comprehensive analysis of the Covid-19 crisis and the worldwide states of siege instituted under its cover.  Reading it, one cannot help but shake one’s head in outrage at the long-planned nature of the wealthy global elite’s seizure of power under the guise of a germ emergency and the revolutionary crisis it has created.

I say this not only because I am predisposed to the author’s thesis, but because he buttresses his argument with overwhelming documentation that is meticulously sourced and noted.  This is a work of genuine scholarship of the highest order, and to read it closely and with an open mind one can’t help but be convinced of its essential truth.

Kees van der Pijl, the author of The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class and the winner of the 2008 Deutscher Prize for Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, introduces his study with these words:
The psychological shock of the proclamation of a pandemic, like the purpose behind torture, is intended to induce acceptance of a ‘new normal’ and to turn off critical judgment. This state of mind is achieved by withholding information about what is really going on, through the extremely one-sided information by politicians and mainstream media. Divergent views by often highly qualified experts are not mentioned or are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories.’ This can be compared to the sensory deprivation in psychological torture. . . .We are dealing with a biopolitical  seizure of power, initiated at the level of global governance and reaching deep into the sovereignty of the individual, a seizure that involves a  whole range of forms of violence.
The reason van der Pijl’s analysis is so powerful is because he clearly sees the historical context for the Covid crisis, how it is linked to issues of geo/economic-politics going back thirty-five years or more, culminating in the 2008 economic crash that ended years of capitalist speculation.  Then when President Barack Obama, serving as the front man for the big speculators, banks, and shadow banks, bailed out those entities and created a new financial order, popular revolts, such as those which were brewing on the eve of the New Deal in the 1930s, broke out around the world in the ensuing years and had to be subdued.  “Strikes, riots, and antigovernment demonstrations have broken existing records in every category during this period [since 2008].”

The elites knew that such revolts of an uncontrollable world population had to be kept under control, and that the growing numbers approaching 8 billion people had also to be culled. But van der Pijl’s subtitle, while intimating both with its double-entendre, leads him to focus on the former that he deems “much more important.” While popular unrest and rage have been more or less suppressed since 2020 with the Covid crisis effectively used to put down its latest signs of eruption and to replace it with a permanent sense of anxiety, fear and trembling was first introduced on a massive scale with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the connected insider anthrax attacks, the Patriot Act, and emergency propaganda measures used to fuel the war on terror that has no end.  This terrorizing of the world has taken multiple forms with an ongoing series of U.S. wars on other countries – Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., not to mention the proxy wars – supported by massive digital propaganda meant to take populations hostage to the lies.

Van der Pijl cogently shows how the Covid crisis fear campaign’s official account is untrue; how it is a political and not a medical emergency; and that it will collapse, as it has, at least temporarily, but how its deeper purpose is to create a  permanent authoritarian, surveillance social order controlled by transnational elites through global digital IDs, etc.

.....

... But I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I think his conclusion may be too optimistic.  For even though he argues that the Information Technology revolution is central to elite propaganda and control, he believes IT – this “social brain” – holds revolutionary democratic potential if it can be liberated from elite dominance.  I don’t see how this can happen, though I wish he were right.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:


....terrific video commentary on the current situation and what is likely to come 

i.e. video of Gonzalo Lira



The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism. 

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” 

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance.

This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of U.S. troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying. 

Peace has been sacrificed for U.S. global hegemony. It has been sacrificed for the billions in profits made by the arms industry. Peace could have seen state resources invested in people rather than systems of control. It could have allowed us to address the climate emergency. But we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. Nations frantically rearm, threatening nuclear war. They prepare for the worst, ensuring that the worst will happen. 

So, what if the Amazon is reaching its final tipping point where trees will soon begin to die off en masse? So what if land ice and ice shelves are melting from below at a much faster rate than predicted? So what if temperatures soar, monster hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires devastate the earth? In the face of the gravest existential crisis to beset the human species, and most other species, the ruling elites stoke a conflict that is driving up the price of oil and turbocharging the fossil fuel extraction industry. It is collective madness.

The march towards protracted conflict with Russia and China will backfire. The desperate effort to counter the steady loss of economic dominance by the U.S. will not be offset by military dominance. If Russia and China can create an alternative global financial system, one that does not use the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will signal the collapse of the American empire.



... Notwithstanding Sullivan’s bluster, Beijing has signaled repeatedly that it stands ready to play a constructive role in securing a ceasefire, saying it “deplored” the ongoing war, and was “extremely concerned” about the harm to civilians in Ukraine. At the same time, having joined President Putin to sign the much-noted Joint Statement on International Relations Entering a New Era 20 days before Russia made its move, Beijing has no interest in undercutting the import of what the two leaders effectively declared an emerging strategic alliance.

Let us not understate the ambition the two leaders expressed in that document. As they made plain, they view this moment as the opening of a new world order based on genuine multipolarity and mutual respect among nations. While the two stressed their statement was not “aimed” at any other nation, if you’re going to stand against unipolar hegemony in the 21st century you have only one nation to talk about. Ukraine, viewed through this frame, is a subset of a much larger dynamic. On Wednesday, indeed, Putin declared that the Ukraine crisis will mark the end of the West’s political and economic dominance. 



I’ve been reading and thinking about this Ukraine thing a lot, and I think it makes no sense to get emotional and pick a side to root for.

The way I look at it, there are three top governments/gangs on planet earth. Let’s call them The Eagles, The Bears and The Dragons. The Eagles are still top dog, but their boss is senile, and his cadre is unable to deal with reality. The Eagles know that the Bears and Dragons are moving in and want to stop them. One plan was to use the gang that used to be part of the Bears, The Weasels, to cause problems for the Bears “Look, don’t worry we got your back. If push comes to shove, we’ll take on the Bears.”

So, for a long time, The Weasels made trouble for the Bears.

And the Bears let it slide because they weren’t ready to take on the Eagles. But, that day did come, and presently the Bears are stomping the shit out of The Weasels. And, the Dementia Don of the Eagles said, “I’ll pray for you.”

Now, The Eagles are trying to kill off The Bears by creating an incredible firestorm of emotional support for The Weasels and hatred of The Bears. And, stopping The Bears' access to credit, dollars, McDonald's, and Netflix.

The Bears are going to sell their gas and oil etc. to The Dragons instead of to the Eagles-aligned little gangs. And, keep stomping The Weasels until they come to their senses and pledge allegiance to the Bears.

The Dragons are just sitting quietly, thinking how to make a buck out of the whole mess, and waiting for their chance to be the world’s top gang.



The “rules-based international order” – as in “our way or the highway” – is unraveling much faster than anyone could have predicted.



..... Russia is not fighting a “war” they are not “fighting” in Ukraine, it’s merely a minor police action, and that’s the first of things the West doesn’t understand. They think all Russian attention is on Kiev. They wanted all Russian attention and invasion locked in Kiev, and the West was depending on all the camera shots of destruction and dead civilians. I don’t think Russia even wants Kiev, or they would make at least some attempt to approach it. 500 civilians killed I’m hearing? THAT’S NOT A WAR. It’s hardly a police action. Maybe they don’t understand war material in the 21st century, but Russia could have leveled Kiev an the other cities in under 30 minutes including all their 5 million people if they wanted. Russia’s attention is on the real war.

..... What is the West? As Gore says, it’s a CONSUMER. Of everything. They print debt and consume things, net producing nothing. So Russia is passively embargoing them. That’s it. And with some help from China, that’s the whole plan. And it’s worse than that, Russia isn’t even trying to embargo the West. There is no need; the West is using the war to embargo themselves.

..... So why would you destroy Ukraine? Or even their people? It’s your own country, and your own people.

This is what the West doesn’t understand, as we are required to have a blitzkrieg, a Schwarzkopf rush to the great capital, a surrounding army destroying radio, electric, roads, water. Why would Russia ever do that? To win, they will have to “own” Ukraine or be merged with them in some way and would simply have to rebuild it. Same with the people. You need Ukrainians to be for Russia, not against it. So killing civilians – or even the valuable army – is strictly counter-productive. If it were possible, they would be best to harm nothing and kill no one, “The Art of War” writ large, but of course in war that is not possible. However, 500 civilian deaths in 4 weeks of modern war is as close as possible to killing no one, and demonstrates their goals and values.

This is the cause for the West to say Russia is “bogged down”, they’re losing. They’re not losing, they’re winning. They are saving the lives of fellow Russians, brother Slavs, while nevertheless gaining control of the country. And this without hardship, as the power is on in Kiev and elsewhere, and people are driving, shopping, and going to work. No unnecessary Ukrainians have been inconvenienced. The trains are running on time to Poland and elsewhere. Why would taking a fully intact country be considered a “loss”?

This is the situation we find ourselves in, and the Russians have been very clear about it. About their needs, their goals, their approach.



A friend insisted that I  watch some of the US TV reporting of Russia’s police action in Eastern Ukraine, called a “Russian invasion” by the Western Presstitutes.  He said it was such comically infantile war propaganda that he was insulted that the media would think Americans stupid enough to fall for it.  To sum it up, there was no reporting, just fictions deployed to demonize Putin and Russia in the most incompetent way conceivable.  The Russians are both destroying Ukraine, bombing and killing everyone, shooting down Ukrainians as they flee cities and losing the war. Their invasion has been halted by Ukrainian forces led by neo-Nazi “freedom fighters.”  This despite all “freedom fighters” being surrounded and cut off.  Massive Russian loses of troops, tanks, and jet fighters are reported.  Only a portion of the Russian troops have been committed to combat, but according to the presstitutes Russia is reduced to replacing its decimated troops with conscripted untrained youth and elderly men and begging China for weapons with which to fight.  Hungry and unfed Russian troops are surrendering to Ukrainian forces in order to get something to eat.  Russia is on the verge of being unable to continue fighting. As soon as Putin is captured, former British prime ministers want him tried as a war criminal. The “news” degenerates from this point on.

The “invasion” is a limited military operation in eastern Ukraine to clear Donbass of the Ukrainian military elements, both official army and neo-Nazi militias, that have been shelling Donbass Russians for 8 years.  Russia intervened after the West and Ukraine consistently refused to abide by the Minsk Agreement  and cease the attacks. 

The intervention has been highly successful. Precision strikes destroyed Ukrainian military infrastructure and weapon systems prior to the arrival of Russian troops.  Ukraine has no air force left, no navy left. Its military units are cut off and surrounded.  The only remaining obstacle is the neo-Nazis who have taken advantage of the Russian policy of minimizing civilian casualties by ensconcing themselves among civilian populations.  The Russians created corridors for civilians to leave, but the neo-Nazi militias do not permit it as they are using the civilians as shields. The Russians are deciding between letting the neo-Nazis leave, which means they would escape both death and the war crimes trials the Russians intend for them, or accepting the casualties of street by street fighting.  Negotiations with Zelensky to end the conflict don’t seem to make much sense as Zelensky does not have control over the neo-Nazi militias.

.... The Russian military intervention could have been avoided, but Washington insisted on leaving Russia no choice. Washington wanted the intervention. ... Andrei Martyanov reminds us of the extent of the “international community.”  Meanwhile, the rest of the world marvels that the Western world with its plan to destroy 7 countries in 5 years can only find war criminals in Russia.



I did not expect Russia to invade Ukraine. I was quite definite about it several times: “Russia will not invade Ukraine” I said. I envisaged several possibilities but nothing like what we have seen in the last weeks. My argument was based on the assumption that Moscow did not want to take ownership of, in Åslund’s words, “the poorest country in Europe“. I still do not think that it does – I believe that Moscow wants a neutral and de-nazified Ukraine that is a buffer between it and NATO. I am also coming to believe that Novorossiya, more or less in its historical borders as formed by Katherine when recovered from the Ottomans, will be independent. The chance that it would remain part of Ukraine has probably passed. As I wrote in 2014 “In short, the West broke Ukraine, it now owns it. Or, to put it more precisely, it owns that part that Moscow doesn’t want. And what part that is is entirely up to Moscow to choose“. Moscow is choosing now.

So why was I wrong? What did I miss?

I believe I missed three things – two I didn’t know about and one that I did but did not properly weigh. These are: the nuclear weapons issue, the planned strike on LDNR and the biolabs.

..... So there are three reasons for an attack now: a pre-emptive attack to stop the possibility of nuclear or biological attacks and to protect LDNR. It is now evident that the “ultimatum” was a last chance: had Washington, the actual power behind the scenes, seriously addressed Moscow’s concerns – NATO membership for Ukraine and forcing Kiev to follow the Minsk Agreements – there would be no war today. .. 

Then, as the war progressed, I forgot Clausewitz’ famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means and over-estimated the speed of developments. At the start, Putin put out the aims: de-nazification, disarming and no NATO. The first to be accomplished by killing them and by trials and exposure of the survivors, the second aim is mostly completed and the third has not yet happened (although Zelensky periodically hints at it). These aims can be achieved by violence or by negotiation (aided by violence – the “other means”). The Russian operation will continue until all three are accomplished. I do not foresee Russian troops advancing much into Western Ukraine: let NATO, Poland especially, have the joy of dealing with Galicia.

But, at the end of the day, there will still be something called Ukraine and plenty of Ukrainians next door to Russia. Moscow prefers that these Ukrainians not hate them and that requires careful and cautious movement and the least number of widows and orphans. Therefore, the first week was fast moving but since then there have been many pauses for talks – without much result as far as we know – pauses for humanitarian corridors and local ceasefires. As Colonel Macgregor says, the Russians are trying to minimise civilian casualties.

Russian forces have a good deal of experience in this sort of thing from Syria and we see the slow encirclement of cities and military deployments always with exit routes to allow civilians (and combatants who have lost their will to fight) to get out of the way. .. Therefore the military operation is in service to the politics and is slower than it would be if only destruction were the aim.



Those of you who followed the link on my essay of yesterday and watched the 10 minute interview with Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko on TRT World’s “Newsmakers” program will surely agree that this high visibility Ukrainian politician is leading the remaining residents of the country’s capital and the broader population of Ukraine straight to disaster in the name of patriotic self-defense.

 I will not waste time here on Klitschko’s vicious lies about the Russian invaders, about their intentions, their deeds and so forth. In my own time at the microphone in the show, I argued that Klitschko’s rejection of any imposed return to the Soviet empire under Russian diktat is total nonsense. Russia has had enough of empire and control of Ukraine would only be an interminable drag on the Russian economy and political focus. The Russian motivation is just to rid Ukraine of NATO formations presently embedded, of NATO membership still projected by the Alliance, and of the neo-Nazi radicals who since 2014 have been the force behind the throne in the Kiev regime.

My point here is to highlight the consequences of the determination of Klitschko and others in the Ukrainian government not to seek any compromises to end the fighting and to save what is left of their country at this point, before the Russians pursue their demolition work to its logical conclusion. If Kiev fails to raise the white flag, fails to negotiate a peace in good faith, the war will end with the civil and military infrastructure of Ukraine totally shattered, with the permanent mass emigration of millions, including the most able-bodied segments of the population, and with a decade or more of destitution for those unfortunate enough to remain.


*** Doctorow: This is how the world ends

Will the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine lead to a World War that quickly escalates to an end of the world scenario in nuclear exchanges?  That remains unlikely, but we are clearly well on our way. It is long past debate whether the conflict is merely between two neighboring countries at the eastern fringe of the European Union. It is a full-blown proxy war between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, and it is about ending or perpetuating American global hegemony.

The latest approval in Washington of $800 million in further urgent military assistance to Ukraine, including the Pentagon’s most advanced attack drones and powerful Soviet era S300 ground to air missile systems makes it perfectly clear that U.S. is sabotaging the ongoing peace talks between Moscow and Kiev for the sake of prolonging a war that can only result on the Ukrainian side in the utter shattering of civil as well as military infrastructure, mass emigration and ubiquitous, calamitous poverty for those remaining; and on the Russian side in wholesale and painful reorganization of the economy away from the West as well as civil discord amid deep disagreements over the war and crackdown on dissent..

So far the West has been spared the pain arising from pending economic distortions on a global scale. However, as the conflict progresses in the direction of total war, which is happening before our eyes now that the United States President and Senate have designed Vladimir Putin as a ‘war criminal,’ the share of misery borne by the broad public in the West may rise dramatically.  The Russians have yet to unleash their own “nuclear option” of economic sanctions against the West, meaning immediate halt in export to “hostile nations” (the USA, the EU in particular) of hydrocarbons, strategic metals, grains and other agricultural commodities. That may come in the days immediately ahead.

.... Meanwhile, the American-led Information War has been proceeding apace, presenting to Western media for instant, unquestioning dissemination a stream of fake news that is intended to raise the public mood of hatred for Russia and things Russian to fever pitch. Our television newscasts are filled with scenes of destroyed apartment buildings in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. Yesterday’s biggest news item was the destruction of a theater in downtown Mariupol said to have housed up to a thousand people seeking refuge from Russian air strikes.

The production of fake war videos became a big industry among American and British propaganda organs during the Syrian War, when Western audiences were shown utterly fraudulent films of alleged chemical attacks by the Assad regime.  Many featured the supposedly heroic and selfless work of  ‘white helmet’ humanitarian volunteers operating in the Syrian war zones. Now these talents and experience are being unleashed to whip up popular outrage over the conduct of the Russian campaign in Ukraine.

This morning’s Russian state television featured an expose of the latest fake news exploits being served up to world media by the Kiev regime. A half dozen such videos and photographic montages were analyzed by Russian experts who tracked down the original footage and on split screen show how what the Ukrainians are claiming to be Russian attacks on the civilian population in Kiev are, for example, footage taken from the SS-21 (Tochka-U) missile blast in downtown Donetsk city this past Monday which killed 21 people outright and injured critically 30 more. That attack was launched by the Ukrainian army from a distance of perhaps 30 miles. Other videos showing alleged destruction of civil buildings are taken from cities, mostly in the Donbas, several years ago, where the aggressor was Ukrainian militias, not Russians or their Donbas allies today. 

Of course, none of the Russian proofs of fraud perpetrated by Ukrainian propagandists with the help and guidance of their American curators will be shown on Western media.  However, we the people can for ourselves determine who is telling the truth and who is lying just by putting on our thinking caps when we look at what is shown on the BBC News, for example.



... Zelensky says this reluctance to plunge the globe into what would almost certainly be a nuclear war shows we are losing our “humanity.”

These criticisms ring hollow, but he almost has a point. It does seem that we have lost touch with our ability to be self-aware, to empathize with the overseas victims of America’s world empire. We love projecting our collective guilt, fear, shame, and complicity in mass atrocities onto the despised Russian people.

Perhaps our humanity is lost each day we continue to allow our ruling class war criminals to knowingly commit and facilitate a genocide in Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country. 

.... Or maybe our humanity was lost when we permitted President Barack Obama, the original butcher of Yemen, to support neo-Nazis to overthrow a duly elected government in Kiev and then kill thousands of the eastern Donbas region’s people. It certainly did not enhance our humanity when Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden chose to arm these fascists.






The classical music establishment demands that Russian musicians condemn their nation’s invasion of Ukraine in order to retain jobs and engagements in the West.






The case against emoting


Vid:



***** Lara Logan (3:50)


Russel Brand: My Response



Tweets:

Testimony of Mariupol residents: Azov Batallion executed civilians triying to escape the city.


Day: There's absolutely nothing opaque or incomprehensible about the existence of a bunch of rich Ukrainians who did everything they could to starve their own countrymen and sabotage Socialism, on behalf of and with full support from capitalist Western powers (especially Nazis).


Mike Wallace: Ireland's tradition of Neutrality is borne out of an unwillingness to kill + be killed in Imperialist Wars that have nothing to do with our people + everything to do with the interests of the elites profiting from Arms, Fossil Fuel + Finance Industries - We like Peace not War...




.... Truly, one of the most under-appreciated and overwhelmingly powerful forces on this earth is the US imperial propaganda machine. The ability to manipulate public thought, not just within the United States but across vast swaths of nations, has allowed it to manufacture international consensus for whatever agendas it wishes to advance in a way that eclipses the collective organizing power of official international bodies like the United Nations.

.... In the book Inventing Reality, published all the way back in 1986, Michael Parenti makes the following observation:
For many people an issue does not exist until it appears in the news media. How we view issues, indeed, what we even define as an issue or event, what we see and hear, and what we do not see and hear are greatly determined by those who control the communications world. Be it labor unions, peace protesters, the Soviet Union, uprisings in Latin America, elections, crime, poverty, or defense spending, few of us know of things except as they are depicted in the news.

Even when we don’t believe what the media say, we are still hearing or reading their viewpoints rather than some other. They are still setting the agenda, defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or reject. The media exert a subtle, persistent influence in defining the scope of respectable political discourse, channeling public attention in directions that are essentially supportive of the existing politico-economic system.
This was long before Twitter, before Google, before Mark Zuckerberg, before Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act allowing for news media to be bought up and consolidated under just a few oligarchic megacorporations. And yet the exact same dynamic we see before us today was already in play, even back then. It’s just gotten a lot more complex.



Wars end in one of two ways: with diplomacy and negotiation, or with mountains of corpses. If you’re opposed to any kind of negotiation with Moscow to bring about peace, then you want the latter. And if you do, you should get your bitch ass on a plane and join the front lines.

❖

Condemning Putin is the easiest, safest, most redundant, least courageous thing that anyone in the western world can do right now. What’s a lot harder at the current moment is taking a bold stand against the west’s depraved role in getting this war started and in keeping it going.


❖

The fawning hero worship of Zelensky is the most embarrassing and self-debasing thing liberals have done since those pink pussy hats.



It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the US is pouring weapons into a foreign nation to defend freedom and democracy.

❖

It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the same western media institutions who’ve lied about every war are now telling the truth about this one.

❖

It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and believe the politicians who’ve demonstrated ice cold indifference to their own citizens dying of poverty and disease care passionately about the plight of the Ukrainian people.

❖

It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and still not know that extremely powerful people have a vested interest in manipulating your understanding of what’s going on in the world and are doing so constantly with varying degrees of success.



It enrages me that “westsplaining” is a word now. Fuck off you ridiculous NPR-addled shitbrains. The absolute gall to protect a murderous globe-dominating empire from criticism and accountability for its non-stop meddling and oppression using words disguised to sound like social justice jargon. Fuck you.
❖

Putin is bad so Yuri Gagarin didn’t go to space and Tchaikovsky wasn’t a good composer and Dostoevsky was a lousy writer and Sputnik was designed by Lockheed Martin and Anton Chekhov was Welsh and Khabib Nurmagomedov was born in Minnesota.

❖

There’s nothing wrong in Ukraine that a little US military interventionism couldn’t make much, much worse.

❖

The strongest argument against the US empire’s proxy war activities in Ukraine is not Nazis, nor biolabs, nor rising gas prices, but the fact that it is bringing the human species ever closer to an extinction-level event after which nothing else will matter.

❖

Those who deny that the brinkmanship between the US and Russia is putting us at unacceptable and ever-increasing risk of nuclear war are simply psychologically compartmentalizing away from the horrifying facts. The source of their claim is their own cognitive dissonance.

❖

That you are is much more interesting than how you are. You could be nothing. Instead you’re a giant-brained biped that gets to walk around and look at things and think abstract thoughts. That’s light years more interesting and impressive than, like, having a university degree or being good at the stock market.

That giant leap from being nothing to being a sentient ape mutant is much, much more vast than the relatively insignificant click from being unemployed to being a millionaire. If you just spend your life really being here, truly relishing this gift, then that’s a life well spent.

An entity that’s never gotten to be a human would be much more impressed with humanness itself than with the specifics of what a given human has achieved and whether it has won the approval of its parents. Just be human. Just be here. Look. Listen. Breathe. Be.

This is amazing.



Other Quotes of the Week:

Heying: This week I have been thinking about what is in store for young children with regard to the Covid vaccines, and the analogous barbarism of medical interventions being encouraged for young people who aren’t comfortable in their natal sex. March 12 was Detrans Awareness Day, and you can find the voices of just a few people who transitioned, then detransitioned, here. I would have thought, until just about yesterday, that we could all agree that profiting on the pain and mutilation of children is immoral1. I hope to live in that world again soon.

Kunstler: It must be obvious by now that the biggest complainers about “misinformation” in the USA are the biggest spreaders of it.

Kunstler2: Readers assure me that Russia is “getting its ass kicked” in that sore-beset, yawning expanse of wheat and mud that has been, one way or another, a domain of Russia longer than the USA has been a nation — except the past thirty-odd years when it has been a playground for homegrown oligarch-looters, US State Department and CIA gamesters, and grift-seeking rogues such as Mr. R. Hunter Biden and the relatives of John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi.

PCR: As for dumbshit Americans, the evidence is never ending. We now have a Pew Research poll of Americans, if it is accurate, that finds that 36% of American Republicans and 35% of American Democrats support American military intervention against Russia in Ukraine “even if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia.”  .. It blows my mind that more than one-third of the US population are willing to endure nuclear armageddon for  the utterly corrupt, nazi-dominated Washington puppet state of Ukraine.

eugyppius: Recruits who sign up to die shooting Soviet-era rifles at Russian battle tanks are not defending “world peace” or democracy or freedom or anything like that. They are sacrificing themselves to convenience some peripheral interests of western globalism, which is responsible for all manner of armed conflict around the world, and which could not be less interested in these quaint liberal abstractions. We are in the end stage of liberalism now, an end stage in which most liberal political forms have been set aside in favour of a naked if distributed autocracy.

Dr. D: Maybe that’s why we constantly think they’re bluffing, the way we would, when really Russia could hardly be more straightforward if they tried. Indeed Lavrov’s top complaint in Turkey last week, but going back years now is that he’s telling them directly how things are and what will happen and like goldfish the West, the media, forget a second later and cannot hear, reporting a different, unrelated thing they fabricated, writing what “he thinks” and “what he meant to do” using their Putin-telepathy.

Macgregor: Russia has largely achieved its objective of neutralizing the Ukrainian military, but Western governments mistakenly believe the deliberate progress designed to avoid civilian casualties reflects weakness and are funneling weapons to prolong the fighting, a former top Pentagon adviser has said. Russian President Vladimir Putin has given strict orders from the outset to avoid civilian casualties and extensive property damage, retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor told the Grayzone in an extensive interview on Tuesday. This has slowed the Russians’ advance “to the point where it has given false hope both to the Ukrainians … but seized on by people in the West, to try and convince the world that a defeat is in progress, when in fact the opposite is the case,” Macgregor said. “The war, for all intents and purposes, has been decided,” the retired colonel said. “The entire operation from day one was focused on the destruction of Ukrainian forces. That’s largely complete.”

Soldo: One of the very interesting sideshows of this war in Ukraine is how western media, always desperate to paint anyone one millimetre right-of-centre as a fascist or Nazi (and happy to get them fired from their employment in the process through cancellation), is now actively downplaying the presence of actual Nazis in Europe on the ground in Ukraine, to the point of siding with them

McBride: “I’ve been asked if I think the invasion of Ukraine is illegal. My answer is: If we don’t hold our own leaders to account, we can’t hold other leaders to account. If the law is not applied consistently, it is not the law. It is simply an excuse we use to target our enemies. We will pay a heavy price for our hubris of 2003 in the future. We didn’t just fail to punish Bush and Blair: we rewarded them. We re-elected them. We knighted them. If you want to see Putin in his true light imagine him landing a jet and then saying ‘Mission Accomplished’.”

Astore: He who pays the piper calls the tune is a saying I learned from my dad. He also taught me to never believe anything you read and only half of what you see. Direct experience is best, of course, but even when you’re living through an historical event, your perspective is necessarily limited and filtered through your own biases. All my readers, I’m assuming, don’t currently have direct experience of the war in Ukraine. So how do we know what’s really going on? And who’s paying the piper to call the tune on the media coverage of the same?

Malone: One of the most important news stories that broke this week was about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Not because of the contents, as salacious and maybe damaging to the reputation of the President as it may be, but for a more profound and disturbing reason. The 2020 election may have been won on a misinformation campaign orchestrated by elements in the US government.

QTR: It turns out that the party who spent four years accusing President Trump of Russian collusion performed a massive cover-up for Joe and Hunter Biden heading into the 2020 election that they have yet to be held accountable for. Go figure.

Elon Musk: "With so many mainstream media companies saying [Russel Brand] is crazy/dangerous, I watched some of his videos. Ironically, he seemed more balanced & insightful than those condemning him!"

Bevan: The news does not matter. It has little, if any real impact on your life besides what you allow it to have. Like a vampire, The news -- whether mainstream, alternative, printed or screen-based -- is a parasitic force that will drain you of your energy, happiness and rationality if you welcome it over your threshold and in to your life. The key is to simply never invite it in.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

***** Eisenstein: Reinventing Progress
How to Move Beyond Technocracy

...... If we are to take a different path, we cannot merely resist the techno-totalitarian agenda; we must offer a different conception of progress, which requires a different story of our origins, purpose, and destiny. That, in turn, rests on a different understanding of our place in the universe and even what the universe is, what is real, how it all works….


and it's time they remembered what their role is supposed to be.


The university bureaucracy has been hijacked for political grudge matches and personal vendettas.



Satirical Fare:

Hillary Vows To Stop Importing Dossiers From Russia

"For a long time, I have relied on Russian intelligence as a prime source for phony dirt on my political opponents," said Clinton as she adjusted the scope on her high-powered sniper rifle. "Starting today, I will refuse to import my disinformation or even my hitmen from Russian sources—that is, unless it's absolutely necessary."

... For the time being, the Clintons have committed to buying their disinformation only from domestic sources like The Washington Post. 


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