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Thursday, April 14, 2022

2022-04-14

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

Economic and Market Fare:

Pettis: Changing the Top Global Currency Means Changing the Patterns of Global Trade
Giving up use of the U.S. dollar for global trade and reserve accumulation would be very difficult for U.S. adversaries and would require major economic adjustments, though it would be in the best long-term interests of the United States for the global use of the dollar to be more constrained.



Ever since Zoltan Pozsar started echoing Zero Hedge circa 2010, and in note after feverishly-drafted note, the former NY Fed repo guru has been writing about a coming monetary revolution in which commodity-backed currencies such as the yuan become dominant and gradually displace the world's reserve currency - the US Dollar - which slowly fades into irrelevancy in a world where commodities are the fulcrum asset and where paper wealth is increasingly meaningless, there have been three reactions: i) those who have no idea what Zoltan is writing about (that would be about 98%), ii) those who agree wholeheartedly and believe that the USD should be dethroned as a reserve currency yesterday, and iii) those who are just a little bit "displeased" with all the attention the strategist (who has correctly called every major crisis and turning point in markets in the past decade) is getting and are starting to lash out at his stream of consciousness.

Rabobank's Michael Every, himself a geopolitical status quo skeptic yet clearly misaligned with Zoltan as to what happens next (and in reality a believer that the broken system we have now will be the broken system we have for a long, long time to come), is in group three, and following a handful of "subtweet" shots across the Zoltan bow (which have barely registered in the financial media, especially Bloomberg, which Every continuously mocks yet reads religiously) the Rabobank strategist has (bravely) penned the closest thing to a Pozsar rebuttal we have seen. 

Is he right, or is he just unhappy with how much attention Pozsar is getting? We leave it to readers to decide, and republish his latest note, "Why "Bretton Woods 3" Won't Work" in its entirety below:

Summary
  • Sanctions on Russia are seen as accelerating a dramatic shift towards a new global commodity-focused ‘Bretton Woods 3’ architecture
  • However, this is actually a very old economic argument: mercantilism
  • History, logic, trade data, and economic geography all show the US can do well in that kind of realpolitik environment
  • By contrast, the opportunity to shift global trade flows away from USD to others is limited: fundamentally, neither CNY nor commodity currencies are set up to rival USD globally
  • The USD will therefore retain its global role despite the ‘Bretton Woods 3’ hype
.....



The only thing surprising about the freight market slowdown is the speed at which it’s unfolding. The supply chain “bullwhip effect” is both predictable and expected. The surge of inventories and declining freight costs/capacity imbalances will be deflationary.

The trucking market has slowed. Demand for trucks usually surges during the Spring, but this year, demand for truckload freight has broken out of this typical seasonal pattern. ...



After a long period of being low and even negative, inflation is now higher than it has been in almost 40 years. Though still well short of the twin peaks of 1975 and 1980, it is the fifth-highest rate recorded since the end of WWII, and it is still rising.

But it ain’t your Daddy’s inflation: what’s driving it is very different to what drove the inflation of the 1970s. Unfortunately, the 1970s experience changed economic theory for the worse, and that theory will guide how the Federal Reserve tries to tackle today’s inflation. It won’t end well. To explain why, I need to use a lot of figures (and a lot of words), so brace yourself. 

.... Are you sick of the inverted commas around “Keynesian” yet? Good. They’re there to make the point that this wasn’t Keynes’s theory at all, but rather how it was caricatured by the anti-Keynesian economist Milton Friedman. Trusting Friedman’s explanation of Keynesian economics is like trusting the fox’s account of why the chickens in the henhouse died.

The true inheritor of Keynes’s mantle was the renegade economist Hyman Minsky (who was the chief inspiration for my work), and he argued that credit was the main factor behind the economy’s ups and downs. When people and firms are borrowing heavily, the economy will boom, and when they borrow less or repay debt, the economy slumps. The important link, in Minsky’s genuinely Keynesian economics, is between credit and unemployment, not between inflation and unemployment.

... The coincidence of rising prices and rising unemployment therefore does have a Keynesian explanation, and the capacity for private banks to create money and additional demand by making loans plays a crucial part in it. But this wasn’t part of Friedman’s thinking at all. To him, the government was the only creator of money in the economy, and—to caricature Friedman, though more accurately than he caricatured Keynes—inflation was caused by “too much money creating too few goods.”

Friedman argued that the economy had a tendency towards what he dubbed the Non-Accelerating-Inflation-Rate-of-Unemployment—or NAIRU for short. 



Labor markets in the US are currently tight, and are generating substantial growth in nominal wages – i.e., those measured in current dollars (not adjusted for inflation). On the other hand, wage growth does not appear to be keeping up with inflation right now, regardless of how the latter is measured.



The recent Op-Ed by FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller warning about an imminent freight recession sparked a tidal wave of selling, but in retrospect, Fuller was spot on. As Bloomberg's Simon White writes, real economic activity in the U.S. is slowing sharply, and "this is showing up in lower demand for new trucks and autos, and a tailing off in freight volumes, leaving transport stocks facing more downside."
 
As White picks up where Fuller left off, heavy truck sales in the U.S. are a "very good leading indicator of economic activity, with 65% of the dollar value of North American freight moved by trucks. But new truck sales have been falling sharply, now at -23% on an annual basis. New auto sales are falling at a similar rate. Truck and auto sales combined are falling at a rate previously only associated with recessions.



..... Alas, central banks, especially the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have fed the creation of zombie companies for years through ultra-low interest rates and QE programs.

Zombies should not exist in the real world, and the real world is about catching up with the “zombified” global corporate sector. With the drastically hastening inflation forcing the hand of central bankers to raise rates aggressively in the coming months, we are heading into a flood of corporate bankruptcies.

And then, calamity.


Vid Interviews:

***** David Rosenberg & Stephanie Pomboy, Part I: The Recession Is Now Here


***** David Rosenberg & Stephanie Pomboy, Part II: "The Market's In For A Hell Of A Lot Of Trouble"




Quotes of the Week:

Yves Smith: Larry Summers alert! He’s still among us and worse may have people in positions of authority listening to him.

Michael Every: Details matter. Or they should. In reality the dirty secret in markets is that nobody actually pays attention to them.

Zen: All of which means the consensus of 7, 10, 16 rate hikes - whatever it is today - is absolute and total bullshit. It's groupthink on steroids. 



Charts: 
1:


In Which Resource Prices Tend to Rise







Other Fare:


In the case of the United States, hundreds of thousands of deaths have been associated with industrial decline in the wake of the neoliberal reorganization of the economy. The existing evidence suggests that deindustrialization and economic malaise combine with the effects of broader public policies (including high incarceration rates), which jointly contribute to these deaths. In Eastern Europe, total excess deaths reach the millions, a much higher human cost to match the much more radical project of converting the socialist economies to (hyper)capitalist economies via shock therapy within only a few years. The epidemics of deaths of despair in the West and the East were not historically unique events that idiosyncrasies of the particular countries could explain. Dysfunctional health behavior in the form of alcohol and drug abuse is central to both deaths of despair epidemics. However, these are proximate and not ultimate causes and, in most cases, are on a shared causal pathway linking upstream economic dislocations to individual ill health.





A massive icy comet emanating from the trans-Plutonian depths of our solar system is on a course to travel closer to earth than any comet of similar size - at least, so far as scientists have been able to tell.

The comet, known as C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), has a frozen nucleus that measures 80 miles across and is 50x bigger than the core of most comets that travel toward the inner area of our solar system.



Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Haidt: WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID

... Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?





... Is it reasonable, at this point, to continue to say Joe Biden told the truth when he said he had nothing to do with his son’s business? Is it believable that he was never in on the deals, or stood to benefit from them? No, it’s not. On the contrary, it seems that Hunter Biden was Joe Biden’s frontman. This is a Joe Biden scandal, not a Hunter Biden scandal.



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

***** Radagast: Nature is sending you a message

.... One of the tragedies of human nature is that we’re better at responding to problems than anticipating them.

..... The idea is that we live in a brief window of opportunity, in which we still have control over the system. As we burn our fossil fuels, feedback loops are triggered that will warm the Earth on its own, without our intervention.

Simultaneously, by consuming these fossil fuels, we lose the energy we need to intervene in the system: We won’t have the power we need to reforest the Earth, sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, block sunlight or do any of the other things we need to do to stabilize the Earth, when we find ourselves spending all our energy on trying to keep nine billion people well-fed in a planet with declining habitability.

Most people in the Western world won’t really acknowledge the existence of this problem and its severity, until the window of opportunity, during which we still had the power to move the Earth in either direction, has been lost. People will argue that it’s too expensive to stop using natural gas, or that the warming isn’t really that bad, or that it really doesn’t matter what we do, because China is doing something else.

Then by 2030 or 2040, once really nasty things start to happen, those people will grow very concerned and say “well it does look like we have a genuine problem after all, we should do something about it”, but by that time, it will be too late, because we pushed the ball off the slope and it began to roll on its own.

What does that look like?

-Forests releasing carbon dioxide, because the trees are dying in droughts.

-Coral reefs dying, thereby preventing them from producing clouds.

-Snow melting, revealing a darker surface that absorbs more heat.

-Melting permafrost releasing more methane and carbon dioxide.

-Declining agricultural yields from droughts and heatwaves forcing humans to chop down forests themselves to grow more food.

-Forest fires releasing dark soot, that settles on snow in the mountains.

-Humans using more energy, because we will now need air conditioning to keep our cities habitable and desalination for agriculture.

These are the sort of positive feedback loops that will unfold in the decades ahead.

As the ball begins to roll on its own, people will say “alright this is indeed getting bad, let’s see if we can do something about it”, but we won’t be able to do something about it anymore, as the force of gravity pulling on the ball will exceed the musclepower we can deliver to push it back up the hill.

Our musclepower, whether we like it or not, were the fossil fuels beneath our feet, that delivered cheap energy with few material inputs. As our industrial civilization grows older and depletes its best natural resources, we become like an old man whose muscles still allow him to performs his daily duties to sustain himself, but he won’t have the time and energy required to embark on great projects anymore: He won’t climb mountains any longer.



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



.... Most studies on vaccine effectiveness omit the period directly after vaccination, but once this immediate post-jab risk is factored in, vaccine effectiveness against death is shown to be statistical smoke and mirrors. But luckily for the vaccine manufacturers, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare employs some of the best data magicians in the business…



The members of COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel of the NIH apparently doesn’t seem to place any value on human life. In this article, I will show several examples of this. Unfortunately, they aren’t accountable to anyone, so they will never have to defend their recommendations. Nearly a million people have died in the US due to their failure to correctly assess what the data says. I’ve invited any of them to discuss this in a recorded meeting with me and a few of my colleagues, but even with a “name your price” incentive, none of them will accept because they know their decisions are not defensible.

In an email to a professor of medicine at a top university, I noted that no matter what the evidence says, they won’t change their recommendations. The professor wrote back, “Suspect you may be correct.” I won’t reveal his name so he doesn’t get fired. That means that fact checkers can’t attack this article with ad hominem attacks on my credentials. And they can’t attack this article on the data either.


Chesnut: The Spike Protein Pathogenic Algorithm

THE SPIKE PROTEIN PATHOGENIC ALGORITHM – DUAL PATHS TO TERMINAL SYSTEMIC FIBROSIS: IMMEDIATE FOR THOSE WITH SIGNIFICANT COMORBIDITIES, INDUCED FOR THOSE WITHOUT. The Spike Protein is inducing terminal systemic fibrosis of all organs, including the blood, via two principal mechanisms. The first is a direct, immediate path via binding to RGD-binding integrins, which includes several TGF-β-activating integrins. This activates Myofibroblasts which induces Fibrosis. ...

.... What is the ultimate point of the Spike Protein’s inhibition of DNA repair?
Loss of the DNA repair potential results in persistent DNA damage signaling, senescence, SASP, fibrosis, and organ failure.




Commentary:


... I also think that the pandemic establishment (sit venia verbo), at least since the eradication of smallpox, has been running a fairly obvious scam: First, they accumulate advisory roles and funding by hyping the threat of anomalous, freak pathogens like Nipah, Marburg and SARS, which are so poorly adapted to human hosts that they cause terrible disease but get nowhere. Then, they take their newly won powers and deploy them against the viruses that actually infect people, which are so mild that nobody ever thought of asking the pandemicists for help with them. Since 1918, the truly lethal pandemic virus has remained elusive, a public relations fiction. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the disease bureaucrats jumped so hard on SARS-2. It was widespread, it looked superficially like one of those scary fundraising viruses, and it wasn’t an ordinary influenza. Opportunities like that don’t come along every day.


the best way to enforce a false orthodoxy of experts is to predicate their livelihoods upon ideological purity

i do not usually simply post the work of others and say “go read this” but i am going to post the work of gatopal™ and personal friend jay bhattacharya here.

jay has stood very tall over covid, co-authoring the great barrington declaration and engaging in endless and spirited defenses of sense, reason, and rights.

he has been in the crosshairs of cancel culture and “expert” nastiness precisely because he is, unlike most of his critics), in fact, an expert.

and this is why they came for him with such uncommon fervor, for when the claims of your ideology are grounded in technocratic notions of “the experts say” then that which is least tolerable to you are members of the credentialed class who oppose your narrative, especially when they have the temerity to (gasp) keep being proven correct.

read carefully about what is going on in california. this bill would require medical boards to censure and/or take the licenses of doctors who, in their own best medical judgment, convey publicly or even privately to patients medical information or advice that the state has deemed “misinformation” about covid. .....

..... 

and so you’ll land at:

all doctors say X.

“i’m a doctor and i do not say that.”

<license revoked>

all doctors say X…

the propaganda mill will be running full steam to manufacture purported unanimity of expert opinion by cowing into silence or decertifying any who dissent.

.... the process of science lies in dispute, not dogmatism.

this sort of political commissar system is the road to technocratic serfdom. ....


***** Jay Bhattacharya (via Bari Weiss): A Warning From Shanghai
A new California bill threatens to strip doctors of their medical licenses for saying things the state doesn’t like. We don't have to imagine what that would look like.

Remember when we were told that China was a model for the world in controlling Covid? Sure, as a totalitarian state, it was able to weld people inside their homes and monitor its citizens via drone. But many in the West believed that such measures were necessary. They argued that the abandonment of personal liberty was an appropriate way to fight a respiratory virus. 

Now Shanghai is the model for the terrifying dangers of giving dictatorial powers to public health officials. The harrowing situation unfolding there is a testament to the folly of a virus containment strategy that relies on lockdown. For two weeks, the Chinese government has locked nearly 25 million people in their homes, forcibly separated children from their parents, killed family pets, and limited access to food and life-saving medical care—all to no avail. Covid cases are still rising, yet the delusion of suppressing Covid persists. .....


The health implications of tiny plastic fragments invading lungs are unknown, but it's a growing health concern, especially for children.


Before 2020, nobody even thought they’d be effective against viruses, two years later we have even more evidence that they don’t work, and yet public health authorities won’t stop promoting them.

... I am open to theories as to how our pointless mask obsessions ever came to be. Right now I have three ideas, which aren’t mutually exclusive and probably all apply to varying degrees:

Copying Asia: Corona was less virulent in the Asia-Pacific region, where masks are more common. A big part of how we got lockdowns and the rest of containment, was a bunch of people assuming that Asia was doing it right and that we needed to copy them.

Making Corona Visible: Consciously or unconsciously (probably both), public health authorities wanted a means of making the pandemic real and tangible to the masses. Pervasive disease statistics were part of this, hand sanitiser and distancing rules another part, masks yet another part.

Maintaining Useful Fictions: A lot of people came out of the first-wave propaganda campaign believing that SARS-2 had a 10% fatality rate and was likely to kill their kids. How could such an enormous threat be reconciled with the decision of authorities to insist on ordinary routine supermarket shopping, to end closures after April, or to weigh the problem of reopening schools? Rather than admit the danger of the virus had been wildly over-hyped, they claimed to have a charm that would magically save its wearers.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

The Censored Fox 🦊: Horrifying: The Shots May Be Altering Human DNA to Produce Spike Protein on a Long-Term Basis
Dr. McCullough: "If this is true... we'll never be able to get this spike protein out of the human species."


McSwane: I stitch it all together in my forthcoming book PANDEMIC, INC.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick.
I know we all have pandemic fatigue. Believe me, I considered this throughout the writing. I do not wish to depress us further. But this is the part of the story you might not have heard - of those who seized advantage of our vacuum of leadership and toxic politics …
It is an artifact of the pandemic, yes, but really a story about us, about America. My hope is it’s a warning to future generations and a blueprint of exactly what not to do when faced with such a crisis. I hope you’ll give it a read.


This is truly beyond the pale. The wave of madness that descended upon us during the past two years was already unbelievable as it was. But it is getting worse. Much worse. The Shanghai lockdown has no justification whatsoever



Draconian Fare:

China Brutalizes Citizens In Quest To Achieve ‘Covid Zero’

For over two weeks the financial capital of China, Shanghai, has been locked down tight. Some 26 million people languish in their apartments, staring at their now-empty refrigerators, unable to set foot outside to forage for food for fear of arrest and incarceration. Foreigners are in the same predicament, as one complained on Twitter: “Day 16 of our COVID lockdown in Shanghai today and food is the key thing on people’s minds. We aren’t allowed to leave home so delivery is the only way I was up at 6 am yesterday trying to get any kind of delivery but nothing was available all day. So far, same results today..” Yet the homebound are the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones are those who test positive for COVID each day, like the 17,077 Shanghainese who did on Wednesday. Symptomatic or not — and nine out of 10 show no signs of illness — they are hauled off to hastily erected quarantine camps. The Shanghai lockdown, the largest since the first Wuhan lockdown two years ago, is China’s latest attempt to achieve COVID Zero. An army of health care workers, some 38,000 in all, have been sent to Shanghai, with instructions to completely stamp out the coronavirus within the city. They are frantically testing and retesting everyone. Unable to protest their lock-up any other way, people have taken to venting their anger by yelling out of their apartment windows. Most of their complaints have to do with food. “We have no food to eat,” they scream. “We haven’t eaten in a very long time. We are starving to death.” ...


101 commentators who urged harder Covid lockdowns

In Shanghai, China, millions of residents have been locked in their homes for weeks. Those who test positive for Covid are taken to detention camps and their pets are killed. Many face starvation, and there have been countless suicides. Despite all this—as is the case in every country that implemented them—these inhuman policies have failed to stop the virus.

This gruesome spectacle has been taken in with horror by international onlookers. Many who once supported lockdowns have gone silent. Indeed, these scenes are the logical conclusion of the Zero Covid cause, and serve as a grim reminder of the dystopia that could have been our own had they gotten their way.

Who gave life to this deadly ideology which culminated in such catastrophe? Below is a sample of 101 individuals and institutions with significant, public-facing credentials who advocated for “real” lockdowns—harder, longer, or earlier than those imposed across the world in March 2020—to control Covid. ....



COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:


I will never tire of typing that the whole question, of how lockdowns became the default response to Corona, is a very hard problem. Some points are nevertheless clear: There was, without a doubt and in the earliest stages, a kind of lockdown cabal, a small group of people in different countries who worked to bring some simulacrum of the Hubei response first to Italy and then to most of the globe. An insidious, coordinated information campaign accompanied their efforts, and this should warn us against easy assumptions that they had good intentions.

On social media, a swarm of manipulative pro-lockdown accounts promoted containment and attacked any prominent politician who tried to steer a moderate course. Michael Senger was among the first to point out that this campaign was operated, in part, out of China. ....

... Senger sets the virus itself to one side; it is for him a minor matter, compared to the great edifice of the lockdown information war. He proposes, along with some other dissident theorists, that SARS-2 might have been circulating as early as 2018, in which case Wuhan is unlikely to the be city of origin: “[T]he CCP could have picked literally any city to shut down for purposes of its lockdown fraud. Xi Jinping [chose] Wuhan because there was a lab there” (p. 99). The lab leak thus becomes, in the Sengerian thesis, above all a propaganda distraction:

.... Senger’s radical scepticism has tactical utility. It presses the Chinese origins of mass containment to the most extreme conclusion possible, leaving lockdown advocates in an embarrassing position, with their awkward histories of publicly extolling Chinese success against the virus. It also has the virtue of insisting that SARS-2 is just not that special. As I have argued many times, this is an important truth, and the only thing that has a hope of disarming the lockdowners and the vaccinators in the longer term.

... Many theses of Chinese motivations in promoting lockdowns to the West are possible. We may have to admit that we don’t know, and that our ignorance has two facets: 1) We don’t know what the Chinese were trying to do, and 2) we don’t always know what the small lockdown-happy cabal of western scientists and bureaucrats who imposed their policies upon us were trying to do.

In the absence of hard evidence, incompetence and a desire to save face might be the simplest path: 

..... The Chinese snake-oil peddlers are an important, early thread in this tapestry. Even if they are not the whole cloth, they are damning enough: Western epidemiologists and public health bureaucrats ditched their own longstanding mitigationist plans in favour of a mass containment fantasy that they copied wholesale from China. They then sold these unsupported improvisational measures to westerners with Chinese help, via a deceptive and malicious propaganda campaign. This is a central aspect of the Corona pandemic, and Senger has done more than perhaps any other person to bring it to the notice of the world.




bill gates, the WEF, and the WHO are not done with us. it's time we were done with them.

... get to about the 1 minute mark in this video where you can hear bill speak about talking to donald trump in the white house.

trump asks about looking into some of the ill effects of vaccines.

gates tells him “that’s a dead end, that would be a bad thing, don’t do that.”

this is not a man giving well intentioned advice.

this is a man covering up a crime committed in the service of crony capitalism.

the gates foundation has a longstanding relationship with vaccines that is more than a little sketchy.  they were pushing oral polio vaccines in africa LONG after they were known to be unsafe and had actually become the leading cause of polio in the world.

......

bill gates is as amoral as he is rich. always has been. much of microsoft was stolen from his less machiavellian partners.

....

this idea that “mRNA is magic and you can develop a vaccine in weeks” is complete nonsense. it’s never been true and the rest of the mRNA vaccine timelines stand testament to it. no other vaxx has been forthcoming.

this HAD to have been in the works for a significant period beforehand.

the fix appears to have been deeply in here. somebody was getting some VERY early looks at some tech to vaccinate against a virus no one else even had a copy of. the awareness not just of the pathogen, but the way to code for its spike protein and the impending pandemic seems to have been loose in certain circles long before the rest of us were told.

....

gates is not a good guy.

he’s a sociopathic nerd with the most unsavory of associates.

and he knows how to play the crony capitalist game with the absolute best of them. the gates foundation has become a barely veiled international influence organization masquerading as a charity.

....

but this is government. it’s worse than government, it’s trans-national organizational government. these are the people who invented “failing up” where the bigger your screw ups, the higher you get promoted. (if you doubt me, look at who runs the IMF and the world bank some time…)

and so, despite having cheer-led for nothing [but] pseudoscience, failure, and human ruin, the current plan being put forward is, wait for it, “hey, let’s give the WHO massive, unaccountable globalist powers!”

of course, this was clearly the plan all along if you were paying attention.

.....

this group should be disbanded, not granted greater remit.

and they are not done, because the power behind these thrones is ever hungry. 

...

the confluence of a global health passport and central bank digital currencies is an extinction level event for personal liberty and privacy.

and make no mistake: gates wants it. the WEF wants it. and most western governments want it.


We can’t let them get away with this power grab

I just got off a call with the WHO that’s left me shaken, reaching for my affirmations and more determined than ever.

As you may know, the WHO is proposing a global pandemic agreement that would give it undemocratic rights over every participating nation and its citizens. Put simply, in the event of a ‘pandemic’, the WHO’s constitution would replace every country’s constitution. Whether your country’s elected government would agree or not, the WHO could impose lockdowns, testing regimes, enforce medical interventions, dictate all public health practice, and much more.

Throughout this pandemic, the WHO has demonstrated its incompetence, dishonesty and corruption. It has withheld safe and established older medicines, ignored the experiences of frontline doctors, disregarded evidence from low, middle and high-income countries, and taken no heed of the values and preferences of people affected by their recommendations. It has ignored the huge numbers of adverse reactions on its own database and has failed to issue warnings about the gene-based vaccines. It has also advertised that the mRNA vaccines are as safe as normal vaccines – and this is simply not the case.

No one in their right mind would want the WHO in charge of a global pandemic. And yet, that’s precisely what it is proposing with its global pandemic treaty.


Prediction: If another "pandemic" can result in more power for the power-hungry, there will likely be another "pandemic."

This story is about the proverbial “slippery slope” as it pertains to the potential new World Health Organization pandemic treaty that may gradually, then suddenly pave the way for the end of national sovereignty as we know it. 

I am using words carefully because I want to be precise. One can easily don their 2019 hat and say, “Well, why I should I care about a WHO document? It’s just some cryptic, pointless formal thing, a bureaucratic project that exists to justify their salaries,” etc. And if I could somehow erase the past two years from memory, I would agree! (In the past, many unbearably boring documents birthed by the United Nations agencies served primarily to justify their salaries.)

However, the past two years cannot be erased. Adhering to the WHO guidelines put countless innocent people on ventilators and killed them, and prevented many from receiving helpful medical attention—and that’s just the surface of the story! We are in the middle of what feels like a global color revolution, where submissiveness and not asking questions make you a good citizen, and “love of freedom” is suddenly an embarrassing and selfish ultra-right value. By the way, even the “reframing” of the previously highly marketable Western freedom didn’t happen overnight but instead, took some years and a very concerted effort! “Updates” to public perception are at the core of any major social change!

Besides, “long-range plans made in secret” (borrowing Steven Newcomb’s term for “conspiracy”) do exist. They exist because human beings with extreme ambitions exist—and they usually like to lie and scam. ...




Check out one of the emails I received when I asked for HHS whistleblowers. The CDC can get away with lying to the public and intimidation techniques because they are untouchable.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:


Sometime in the distant future, when the Russian internal documents relating to the conduct of this war in Ukraine are made public, one of the great conundrums of our time may finally receive a definitive answer:  why Russia has been prosecuting its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine with one hand tied behind its back, always holding back the vast destructive forces at its command, and so drawing out the operation and suffering losses of its soldiers in a way which a more cruel, ‘American style’ campaign would largely have avoided. 

At the very start of the armed conflict, I remarked on the specifics of what I called ‘the Russian Way of War’ now being applied in Ukraine. This approach does not inflict death on huge numbers of civilians, does not count on a ‘shock and awe’ initial attack to demoralize and overrun the enemy.  I said at the time that the overriding considerations on the Russian side were the traditional ‘brotherly’ relations between Ukrainians and Russians, who were extensively intermarried and had relations on both sides of the national frontiers. The intent of Vladimir Putin and his war collegiums was to do minimal damage to the Ukrainian people, to try to separate the ‘healthy’ elements in the Ukrainian military command from the rabid nationalist Azov and similar irregular forces that had become embedded in the army over the past eight years. If the two could be separated, the war could be won with absolute minimum expenditure of materiel and loss of life.

..... At the same time, no one, NO ONE, in the West has commented on a few obvious facts that place the Russian ‘military operation’ totally outside the traditions of invasions or other acts of aggression.  The Russians’ choice of words to describe what they were about to do was anything but arbitrary. They had specific objectives of ‘demilitarization’ and ‘denazification,’

..... the appointment of Dvornikov is only one sign that the Russian Way of War is being reconsidered at present in the highest levels of the Russian command.  In part, this is so because of the ever more daring, or shall we say reckless American and NATO promises to supply heavy armaments to Kiev. The alarm bells rang in Moscow yesterday over statements by a Deputy Secretary of Defense in Washington that the next level of support to Kiev would include intermediate range missiles capable of striking at airfields within Russia.

The Russian response to that threat was immediate.  General Konashenkov, the spokesman of the Russian military throughout the campaign, issued a special announcement that any attacks on Russian territory coming from Ukraine would result in Russia’s directing strikes at the decision-making instances in Kiev, which the Russian command had so far chosen not to do. 


They are nearer than you think

....Since objective reality has no place in United States foreign policy, it is interesting to look at how the US sees itself and how it regards other countries that are doing what Russia is doing or worse. When it comes to its own self-perception, America’s so-called leaders believe that their global leadership role is one by right and they can do no wrong by virtue of a quality referred to as “American exceptionalism.” That is of course a mythical attribute created to permit the United States to get away with mass murder and regime change without any consequences.



....... So there you have it, clear as day: the object of this left-wing “anti-war” rally was to “keep the pressure” on the ruling Conservative Government… to continue ramping up weapons shipments to Ukraine. For use in… intensifying warfare.

... “Put an end to Putin’s reign! Arm, arm, arm, Ukraine!” That’s the new mantra of the British anti-war movement! If nothing else, one has to appreciate this audacious innovation in the fluidity of language.

.... An advisor to Zelenksy heralded the move as further evidence that “The UK is the leader... in the anti-war coalition.”

Has there ever been an “anti-war coalition” that so passionately and openly advocated literal warfare? It’s truly remarkable! 



I want to focus on the Ukrainian’s desperate attempt to stage horrific attacks to gin up Western hatred of Russia. This has been the most “effective” component of Ukraine’s failing effort to fight Russia. But I put “effective” in quotes because the propaganda pushed about Bucha and the missile attack on Kramatorsk has not compelled NATO to intervene ...



The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.


  • According to bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, Russia’s accusation that Ukraine is conducting U.S.-funded bioweapons research appears to be accurate 
  • If true, everyone involved is subject to life in prison under the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989. 
  • According to Boyle, the U.S. government and Pentagon have had a “comprehensive policy” to “surround Russia with biological warfare laboratories” and “preposition biological weapons” there for use against them
....... While the U.S. has vehemently denied Russia’s accusations, Boyle says that based on what he’s discovered so far, the labs in Ukraine are all conducting biological warfare research — including ethnic-specific biological weapons — at the behest of the U.S. Pentagon, just as Russian authorities are claiming. “The Pentagon does not do missionary work,” he says. “They kill people, and that’s why they are there.” He also points out that everyone involved is subject to life in prison under the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which explains the mad scramble to project these labs as something other than what they are.


i just love this headline:

... as a point of departure for a mini-rant about the arrogance and rank incompetence of America’s elites .. I am at a loss to understand why the US thinks throwing more force behind a clearly failed diplomatic strategy is a bright idea

... I don’t like pathologizing the behavior of our putative leaders, since they are unduly fond of demonization presented as armchair analysis. But it’s hard to think of a historical example of such arrogant, short-sighted, and self-defeating foreign policy.


Vids:


This video is guaranteed to depress the hell out you and/or scare you to death. It also, hopefully, will spur you on to even greater anger at the reckless ruling class racketeers known as the foreign policy Blob, They're an incestuous clan of careerist Republicans and Democrats, the permanent security state, the  corporate media and Hollywood. Their de facto motto in the United States' ongoing proxy war against Russia is "We're all neocons now!"




Tweet Vid:

no one: French reporter returning from Ukraine "Americans are directly in charge of the war on the ground."


Orwellian Fare:






...  the push for a global vaccine passport coincides with the WHO’s drafting of a global pandemic treaty, which would legally bind member states to the WHO’s International Health Regulations and allow the organization to dictate all future pandemic responses, utterly quashing national health sovereignty. 


CaitOz Fare:


... While it is true that India’s right-wing government is guilty of human rights abuses and has been for years, it is also true that the US State Department does not actually care about human rights abuses.

A leaked State Department memo from the early days of the Trump administration showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. In a remarkable insight into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.

... just the latest in a series of shots across the bow that the US empire has been firing at New Delhi to warn it against moving into alignment with Moscow.



....... If you’re beginning to get the nagging sense that the mainstream consensus worldview is a construct manufactured by the powerful, for the powerful and everything you were taught about your nation, your government and your world is a lie, that’s definitely a possibility worth considering.

If it’s starting to seem like we’re all being manipulated at mass scale to think, act and vote in a way which benefits a vast power structure that rules over us while hiding its true nature, I’d say that’s a thread worth pulling. ...

... If you believe it’s possible that these existential crises we’re fast approaching may be the catalyst we need to collectively rip the blindfold from our eyes and begin moving in a truth-based way upon this earth and creating a healthy world, then we are on the same page. ..



If you’ve been following the news about Ukraine but still don’t understand that it’s the single most aggressively narrative managed and psyop-intensive war in human history, there is a 100 percent chance you believe false things about what’s happening there.

❖

Humanity will either extinguish itself in a cataclysm of its own making or awaken from its delusion-based conditioning and become a conscious species. And whichever one happens, all our partisan bickering and sectarian spats will look pretty ridiculous in retrospect when it does.



... I raise my glass to all draft dodgers, who chose to run and hide rather than kill and be killed for some rich asshole’s power agendas. Who chose the condemnation and scorn of an insane society which praises mass murder and elevates sociopaths. Who chose excommunication from the death cult over bloodshed for geostrategic domination and Raytheon profit margins.

...... There are no war heroes. There are only war victims. Here’s to everyone, ever, who throughout the ages has chosen not to be made one.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Taibbi: A month after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, blood seems to be rushing to all the wrong places across the Commentariat, which has begun in earnest the predictable process of asking the public to dismiss fears of nuclear combat.

Welsh: The West has such a culture of impunity for elite incompetence that elites think that whenever elites are fired or punished for anything it’s “Stalinist”.


Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


How can we stay resilient and avoid becoming fodder for authoritarian social and political movements as the economy declines and the social mood becomes more polarizing? We will all wish for different circumstances, but as the Stoic philosopher Seneca advised, “If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”

... If you interact with a person who is eminently confident in his rational thinking process, run away far and fast. Robert Heinlein wrote, “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” 

....... We construct our self-concept. Because it is a construction, we rationalize our self-concept by feeding and defending it with our thought-based stories. When we reinforce our self-concept with an outside-in narrative, we are shifting blame for our feelings onto someone or something else. A story that reverses cause and effect relieves us of responsibility since we see ourselves as the effect of external forces.

... In his seminal book on mass movements, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer cautions, “There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves.” Hoffer observed, “The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on.” 

When we become aware of an outside-in tendency in our own thinking, we can become more aware of the voice of our Dictator Within narrating our story of me, hijacking our self-concept. We can choose to defuse from our inner dictator. 

.... While attempting to avoid uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, we often give them our full attention; they become all-consuming. “Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are,” wrote the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains the mindset that causes us to give our dysfunctional thinking such relevance. Kahneman points us to the focusing illusion: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” 

... There is an alternative to following the lousy advice of your Dictator Within with its claims of being rational. In The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek writes, “The case for individual freedom rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends.” 

...How tightly are you fused to your thinking? Every human being lives within the limits of his mind. We don’t control our thinking, yet we can pause and choose not to buy into our thinking.  ...


Christopher Eisgruber’s attachment to contradictory high principles is turning academic life on his Ivy League campus into a farce

Say what you want about Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University—he is a principled man. The problem is that he holds principles that are in serious conflict with one another. In this, he is not alone: Most people hold contradictory views on complicated matters. 

... To his credit, Eisgruber sincerely believes in academic freedom, a fact that explains why Princeton was the first educational institution, after the University of Chicago, to adopt the so-called Chicago Principles of free expression. However, he also quite sincerely holds the belief, consistent with the progressive view, that a main goal of the university is to advance “social justice”—a principle whose advocates proclaim it to be of urgent and totalizing importance. In holding these two beliefs together at the same time, Eisgruber may be demonstrating the power of a first-rate intelligence, which, as Princeton dropout F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, shows the “ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” He is perhaps also in danger of becoming a comic opera character in the middle of an unfolding tragedy that threatens the foundations of higher education in the United States.





... And so that immediately raises a seeming contradiction: If I say I reject animal cruelty, but eat grains that need pesticides that kill mice, am I not killing more animals than someone who merely eats his grassfed beef? Was I scammed all along? Should we all just be eating big fat cows? Or heck, should we transition to eating elephants perhaps? Would that be the most ethical option, grassfed elephant meat?

Well I’m glad to see you’re all so well off that you’re eating grassfed beef in today’s economy. Those who are worse off are eating pigs fed plastic: .. [vid]

And if you’re eating chickens, you’re eating some animal with pus-filled sores somewhere that can’t stand on its own feet, surrounded by dead specimens of its own kind: .. [vid]

... It’s ultimately all very very simple:

When you eat peanuts, one gram of plant protein becomes one gram of protein for you.

When you eat a cow. One gram of plant protein, becomes one gram of protein for the cow. But the cow now needs 25 grams of plant protein, to produce one gram of protein as food for you!

And so what should we expect? We would expect that we need roughly 25 times as much physical space to feed you your grassfed beef, as we would need to feed you plant protein directly!

.... But saying this of course brings out all the people who think it’s perfectly fine to poison our atmosphere, who think that all this madness will somehow not have any harmful consequences to our future.

And that’s the general pattern I notice:

YOU JUST DON’T WANT TO KNOW
 
That’s really all there is to it. And I wish you would all just say this out loud, it would make it all a lot easier, it means we all know where we stand.

..... That’s it. That’s really all there is to it. And I’m not blaming you. Do you think I want to be aware on a constant basis of all the suffering my existence requires? No, I can barely handle the part I am aware of.

Life is a lot of fun, when you’re not aware. 


Fun Fare:

Katzen!


Pics of the Week:




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