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Thursday, April 28, 2022

2022-04-28

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

Economic and Market Fare:



Inflation has stayed higher longer than I expected. I got that one wrong. I am happy to acknowledge my mistake, but I also want to know the reason why. This is not a question of finding excuses, I want to know why the economy is acting differently than I thought it would.

The most obvious reason is the supply chain disruptions that led to the original jump in prices have lasted longer and been more far-reaching than I expected. Part of this is due to the persistence of the pandemic, with the delta and omicron strains disrupting economies around the world.



Three weeks ago, Deutsche Bank shocked the polite world of finance - where nobody dares to tell the truth if the truth is unpleasant and runs counter to the commission-boosting bias of being bullish on everything - when it became the first Wall Street bank to officially make a US recession in late 2023 its base case (here we of course exclude such uber-bears as BofA's Michael Hartnett or SocGen's Albert Edwards, who have pitched recessionary scenarios explicitly different from the banks' bullish "base cases").

Then last week, the bank doubled down on its shock factor when it came out with an even more bearish view in its latest "House View" note, in which the bank' top economist explained that not only is a recession assured but that inflation expectations "will likely move significantly higher, ultimately leading to an even more aggressive tightening and a deeper recession with a larger rise in unemployment" which in turn will mutate into the outcome the Fed has been so desperate to avoid: a hard landing. ...

In short, DB believes that the scourge of inflation - which most of the bank's peers still have trouble as seeing as anything more than just transitory (even if they finally conceded it in public after claiming it falsely for all of 2021) - has returned and is here to stay. It does so for five reasons: ...

... Bottom line, the Fed is far behind the inflationary curve that substantial monetary restraint is needed, far more than the market expects. 

.... So How much does the Fed have to raise rates and what will be the impact?

Short answer: a lot. So much in fact it will break the market. According to DB, the Fed's first task is to get the fed funds rate back to neutral as quickly as possible. With inflation likely to be elevated well into next year (until the Fed succeeds in slowing things down), the neutral level of the Fed funds rate could well be in the vicinity of 5% ....

... In any event, DB expects that the policy rate hikes, balance sheet reduction, and rising inflation expectations will raise the 10-year Treasury yield to a peak level in the vicinity of 4-1/2 to 5%!

... This, needless to say, is troubling because such monetary tightening - and the financial upheaval that accompanies it - will push the economy into a significant recession by late next year. 



..as the Fed once again makes a policy mistake.

..... From a technical perspective, we can analyze levels where previous rate increases impacted economic activity. The current surge in bond yields has taken the 10-year yields to extreme overbought levels. As with the 2-year rate, the 10-year rate is now 4-standard deviations above its 52-week moving average. It is also approaching the top of the long-term downtrend channel from 1980.

... In short, the Fed will keep pushing until something breaks... and judging by today's market crash that day may be sooner than most think.

[now, that conclusion is something I can definitely get on-board with!!]



The COVID pandemic, and most importantly, the global policy response to it, pulled forward decades worth of societal trends in a very short period of time. Almost everyone across the globe was sequestered in their homes for the better part of two years, driving a torrent of inflation that is here to stay.

The inflation is entrenched because a large number of jobs are now being done from home, and the wealthy computer desk jockeys working these jobs now require a different mix of goods. The global supply chain was not prepared for the wealthiest and largest consumers to ditch their one- to two-hour daily commute in favour of strolling into their home office clad in the latest Lululemon jammies. If you’re one of these keyboard warriors, your consumption basket in and around the office is completely different from the basket of goods you enjoy inside your place of abode. That is why inflation, at least from a goods perspective, will remain sticky.

..... The unfortunate fact is that most citizens of the world’s largest economies assembled a portfolio of short call options on the volatility of the universe. The central bankers’ printing presses are employed as crude cudgels in an attempt to smother the inherent instability of our existence. COVID-induced inflation mixed with a major global conflict has created a dangerous cocktail that threatens to plunge hundreds of millions of souls into starvation.

The function that concerns personal and institutional capital allocators is how countries that are not in the Western axis of power will respond to the fallout of financial sanctions on Russia. This essay will approach the financial response of one large country (China) and one small country (El Salvador) in an attempt to stress the function of f(x): in ways to inform us of the possible end game. ....



Apart from inflation and war, what grips current economic thought is the apparent failure of what mainstream economics likes to call ‘globalisation’.  What mainstream economics means by globalisation is the expansion of trade and capital flows freely across borders.  In 2000, the IMF identified four basic aspects of globalisation: trade and transactions, capital and investment movements, migration and movement of people, and the dissemination of knowledge.  All these components apparently took off from the early 1980s as part of the ‘neoliberal’ reversal of previous national macro-management policies adopted by governments in the environment of the Bretton Woods world economic order (ie US hegemony). 


......... The latest globalisation wave started to wane as early as the beginning of the 2000s when global profitability slipped back. 

........... But globalisation will only return if and when capitalism gains a new lease of life based on enhanced and sustained profitability.  That seems unlikely to happen this side of another slump and maybe more war.


There is increasingly a consensus in Beijing that China’s excessive reliance on surging debt in recent years has made the country’s growth model unsustainable. Aside from the economy’s current path, there are only four other paths China can follow, each with its own requirements and constraints.

The first quarter GDP numbers that China’s National Bureau of Statistics released last week have renewed what was already an aggressive debate about whether or not China would be able to meet the 5.5 percent GDP growth target it set for itself this year. Two weeks ago, for example, for the second time in three months, the International Monetary Fund lowered its GDP growth forecast for the country to 4.4 percent from 4.8 percent in January 2022 and 5.6 percent last October. Given the serious headwinds the economy is facing, many analysts question whether China can achieve even this rate of growth.

But it’s a mistake to view China’s growth in terms of whether it can or cannot achieve a particular GDP target. China’s GDP growth is not a measure of the country’s economic output and performance in the same way the statistic is for other major economies. China’s GDP growth target is an input decided by Beijing at the beginning of the year. Its fulfillment depends on the extent to which the economic authorities are able and willing to use the country’s resources and debt capacity to achieve the required amount of economic activity.

Higher GDP growth for China, in other words, doesn’t mean a better economic outcome than lower GDP growth, as it does for most other economies. It just means that the authorities were more willing to employ resources for creating economic activity, whether or not that activity is productive or sustainable. ....


Fact check: Has extreme poverty in India really dropped below 1%, as a new IMF paper claims?



Charts: 
1:
Compared with 60 years ago, workers are getting less and shareholders are getting more — sometimes a lot more.
Tweets and Quotes:

Mark Copelovitch: It's been clear for a long time now that inflation is mainly a cross-national shock induced by a set of common global shocks/factors. On the margin, 🇺🇸 fiscal policy mattered, but it hasn't been the main variable (see @M_C_Klein
's many posts, etc.)
4. The inflation has really been three inflations: 1) pandemic-induced global supply shock; 2) 🇺🇸-specific stimulus demand shock; 3) food/energy war-related shock. Our political narrative is that this is all about 2). The reality is that’s basically done & was on the margin.
Next you're told there is a wOrKeR sHoRtAgE, as if it's a settled given, b/c "many economists" have said so. Except, there's no clear evidence this is really true. Again, the Narrative™️ has you, & you've barely started reading 4/


Pettis: 2/9: For over a decade Beijing has had to choose between, on the one hand, tolerating much slower growth and keeping financial imbalances from getting out of hand, and, on the other, allowing debt to mushroom so that the country could achieve its extravagant GDP growth targets.
3/9: It always chose the latter, but ultimately this wasn't sustainable. The more debt rose, the more rising debt itself would undermine growth in the economy. Of course the longer this went on, the more difficult the adjustment would be.
...
8/9: But because pro-cyclicality tends to surprise us both on the way up and on the way down, policymakers are likely to underestimate for many years the extent to which growth must slow if they are to keep the financial imbalances from getting worse.


Bubble Fare:

Granted, no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy. The best we can do is measure the amount of buffoonery that precedes collapse. Which in the current case is on the scale of biblical. Through necessity, the level of buffoonery has had to increase from one larger bubble to the next, according to the law of magical thinking. Central banks in their infinite hubris have constantly bailed out the masses from impending reality. And in  doing so they have painted this society into a corner. At this latent juncture, rampant corporate profiteering has forced the Fed into record tightening...

The level of denial is very similar to 2008. 

We are constantly told "The consumer is strong", but it's a massive lie as anyone can see:




(not just) for the ESG crowd:

COVID-19 and climate change are rapidly making it clear that, in today’s crowded and interconnected world, disaster impacts increasingly cascade across geographies and sectors. Despite progress, risk creation is outstripping risk reduction.

Despite commitments to build resilience, tackle climate change and create sustainable development pathways, current societal, political and economic choices are doing the reverse. This jeopardizes not only achievement of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, but also hinders progress towards the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out in the Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

To change course, new approaches are needed. This will require transformations in what governance systems value and how systemic risk is understood and addressed. Doing more of the same will not be enough.

Risk creation is outstripping risk reduction. Disasters, economic loss and the underlying vulnerabilities that drive risk, such as poverty and inequality, are increasing just as ecosystems and biospheres are at risk of collapse. Global systems are becoming more connected and therefore more vulnerable in an uncertain risk landscape. Local risks, like a new virus in Wuhan, China, can become global; global risks like climate change are having major impacts in every locality. Indirect, cascading impacts can be significant.

Without increased action to build resilience to systemic risk, the SDGs cannot be achieved.

Investment in understanding risk is the foundation for sustainable development. However, this needs to link to a reworking of financial and governance systems to account for the real costs of current inaction to address risks like climate change. Without this, financial balance sheets and governance decision-making will remain fragmented and be rendered increasingly inaccurate and ineffective.

... Taken into account the role of the mainly affected brain regions, they correlated that the observed structural alterations could be compatible with the phenotypic and cognitive decline reported of the individuals.



Pics of the Week:

Visualizing All Electric Car Models Available in the U.S.




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Crispin-Miller: Did Macron really win? Or did he "win" like Biden and Bush/Cheney?
Did the French people really vote for bio-fascism, or did they vote to take their chances standing up against it, even with Marine Le Pen?


A week ago Barack Obama let loose his inner fascist and gave an hour-long speech at Stanford University that deserved more attention than it got.

A week ago Barack Obama let loose his inner fascist and gave an hour-long speech at Stanford University that deserved more attention than it got.

"I'm pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist," Obama told his audience and then spent the rest of the hour proving he is anything but. In fact, the Obama that emerges in this speech is one scary dude.


But don't tell "our free press," whose job is to deny it, while doing everything they can to bring it on



..... Dr. Benjamin Braddock reported on Twitter a number of these unusual food-related fires. There was a massive fire at a Salinas food processing plant. The facility produces for Taylor Farms.

Dr. Ben Braddock reports on at least a dozen more suspicious fires targeting similar facilities - Smithfield Foods, Deli Star Meat, Hot Pockets, Tyson Poultry, Bonanza Meat, Mair-Rite Steak, JBS Beef, McCrum Potato, Kellogg's, and Cargill-Nutrena. 


Related Quotes and Tweets:

Schofield: Even this cursory discussion of this wee summary section has left me extremely depressed. As anyone whose paid even passing attention knows, the U.S. response to the covid crisis has been – and continues to be – a shambles. (To be sure, some other countries have done somewhat better, and others, much more so.)

Nonetheless, addressing other challenges requires global cooperation – and that includes the U.S.and other countries that have failed at coping with covid.

Does anyone really think the current cast of clowns – and their progeny – are up to coping with the climate change conundrum – or indeed any of the other problems the planet faces, such as the collapse in biodiversity.



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

Coincidences or pointing in the direction of what's to come?





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:

Vanden Bossche: The immunological rationale against C-19 vaccination of children

When a deep understanding of immunology, virology, vaccinology, evolutionary biology, and molecular biology is applied to analysis of whether children should receive current vaccines against COVID-19 (C-19), it is concluded that recommendation of such vaccination is scientifically unsound and that such vaccination is harmful to individual children, children as a group, and Humanity as a whole,for the following reasons: ...



Conclusions and relevance: Results of this large cohort study indicated that both first and second doses of mRNA vaccines were associated with increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. For individuals receiving 2 doses of the same vaccine, risk of myocarditis was highest among young males (aged 16-24 years) after the second dose. These findings are compatible with between 4 and 7 excess events in 28 days per 100 000 vaccinees after BNT162b2, and between 9 and 28 excess events per 100 000 vaccinees after mRNA-1273.



... The raw numbers show about 19,500 more deaths in Feb 22 than Feb 21. But there were only about 5000 Covid-related deaths (about 40% of which aren’t actually from Covid). So what explains this large jump? Well, nobody knows for certain. But if you want to try answering that question, I’ll give you three shots.


Commentary:

gotta go to the link to see all the awesome pictures, documenting human intelligence!!!
***** Rigger: Foiling the foil hats

.... This, in a nutshell, is my problem. There are too many things which don’t make full sense when trying to explain them from a stance of science (proper science, not The Science™) or health.

... I’ve written about stuff I can’t explain in previous articles. The list is very big - but here are just some highlights
  • previous pandemic preparedness plans were ditched
  • no cost/benefit analyses of NPI’s were done
  • ludicrous collection of death stats (the deaths within 28 days of a +ve test thing)
  • restriction of outdoor activities
  • outdoor masking
  • mass testing of asymptomatic people
  • vaccine passports
  • the refusal to publish complete data sets
  • the deliberate amplification of fear when the stats clearly show only a low to moderate threat for the vast majority
There are many, many more. Rationality, like a visitor allowed round the bed of a dying family member, was a very rare thing indeed.

I don’t know how to make any sense of this at all.


Vinay Prasad: Things the CDC does not know (subscription req'd)
And how this causes policy turmoil
reposted in full: via zerohedge


Or so they say.

The breaking news of today! A new Canadian Medical Association Journal study unequivocally proves that unvaccinated must be put down, lest they threaten the vaccinated: “Unvaccinated People May Increase Risk For Others“. Run for your life!

OK, slow down everyone before jumping your guns! As it turns out, the “study” is a modelling study, i.e., a bunch of parameters that can be adjusted to produce any result required by the study sponsors: ...

..... Nothing in this “study” hashes out with reality, from the assumptions, the setup, the results, or the conclusions.

Except to provide a headline for the gazillion of articles in the world “news” media today that all will be shouting, ad nauseam, “Unvaccinated people are a risk to society!!!“

Now we know that this is just another psy-op. Isn’t it the best time to get second booster?


more, and much more extensive, on same:
Disinformation Must Be Called Out

The legacy media has been like pigs at a trough today and yesterday with the publication of an atrocious ‘peer-reviewed’ ‘scientific’ article by Dr. David Fisman, Dr. Ashleigh Tuite, and a graduate student. After all, with raw public health data unable to support the only COVID-19 narrative that has been deemed acceptable, fresh fuel was apparently needed. Lots of media outlets have been reporting on this study; one of them being CTV News. Here is the headline for their article:
“Being with unvaccinated people increases COVID-19 risk for those who are vaccinated: modelling study”
.... This paper by Fisman, et al. is only thinly veiled hate speech under the guise of science. Before I walk you through the numerous massive errors in this paper, let me first show you one example of the messaging regarding the impact and relevance of the paper. ........

........... …remarkable, isn’t it! Correcting only this one assumption completely reverses the conclusions of the paper. All of a sudden every ratio drops below ‘1’, meaning that transmission is occurring disproportionately from ‘vaccinated’ people. Now the ‘unvaccinated’ are serving as a protective buffer for the ‘vaccinated’.

Now one must ask how skewed the conclusions of the paper would go in the opposite direction if the several other incorrect assumptions were to be corrected. As you can plainly see, this paper by Fisman, et al. is nothing short of preposterous. ......

... Fisman had Tweeted, “Our paper supports the idea that the decision to remain unvaccinated confers risk not only on the unvaccinated individual but (disproportionate to contact rates) on vaccinated individuals too”.

If Fisman were to demonstrate objectivity as a scientist, he would update his Tweet to state something like the following: “After correcting just one of the several inappropriate immunological assumptions, our paper now supports the idea that the decision to get ‘vaccinated’ confers risk not only on the ‘vaccinated’ individual but (disproportionate to contact rates) on ‘unvaccinated’ individuals too; unlike our previous conclusion, this corrected model matches real-world data. Thank-you to those who chose to remained ‘unvaccinated’ since you are now selflessly serving as a buffer to the ‘vaccinated’. We are sorry to the field of public health modeling for disclosing how easy it is for the conclusions of our models to be manipulated by assumptions that we sometimes pull out of thin air. We also apologize to ‘unvaccinated’ people (most of whom have received legitimate vaccines throughout their lifetimes) for misleading media organizations around the world into promoting hatred against you. Now that our model has been shown to point to the ‘vaccinated’ as the main culprits of transmission of SARS-CoV-2, we implore you to not promote hatred against us like we have done to you.”


If, God forbid, we face another pandemic, we cannot use our COVID strategy as the baseline.

.... The past two years have been far too disruptive and divisive to move on without a backward glance. From what I can see in my own world, even those who earnestly supported and complied with COVID measures have begun to wonder how much of it made sense, or if any of it did. 

Like it or not, we’re headed for a National Conversation. If it devolves into endless bickering over masks, school closures, vaccine mandates, or any of the many individual measures that comprised the response, it is sure to be as unproductive as all our other National Conversations. 

A more fruitful discussion would begin at a fundamental level, with values and principles we tossed aside, seemingly without scruple, in early 2020. 

Some are basic moral principles. Others are foundational to governance and journalism. Some are specific to the practice of public health—perhaps not commonly known, but certainly common sense. 

What Were We Doing, Exactly? .....

..... If an approach—untested, and extraordinarily disruptive and expensive—is not meeting expectations, is that not a good time to question the assumptions behind those expectations? 

Nah. ............

In defending measures, COVID maximalists often invoked the Precautionary Principle, sometimes known as the “better safe than sorry” rule. This was a one-way reading of the Precautionary Principle, and some would say a backward one. The standard interpretation of the Precautionary Principle biases the status quo—not “restriction as status quo,” the original status quo. It is meant to be a backstop against hasty implementation of policies that might cause harm, and places the burden on advocates for an intervention to prove it will not do so. ...

In an emergency, it might make sense to try an intervention while data is gathered … but the data must be gathered! The reluctance to provide robust evidence for COVID policies contributed to decreased trust in public health authorities, and likely prevented energy and resources being devoted to the highest-yield efforts. 

..... There was no room for those who were rationally concerned about COVID, but also about the response. Questioning COVID policies was tantamount to donning an enemy uniform

.... As two Rutgers law professors said in this excellent essay in Tablet, discourse was “fostered by an elite culture whose overconfidence led to … undermining open discussion in a vain attempt to prove that complex questions could only have one universal and immutable answer.” The “overselling of policy … led them to religiouslike zeal and dogmatism about particular interventions.”

The faith in COVID policies was so entrenched, lack of compliance was the only conceivable explanation for our failure to crush the virus. .....

I look forward to someone studying this more thoroughly, but in my observation, alarmism made the anxious more anxious, annoyed the “rationally concerned” (a category to which I belong, but which our dichotomous partisan discourse insisted did not exist), and, I suspect, made the “irrationally unconcerned” more skeptical.

Exaggerated risk perceptions also served to keep dubious interventions in place for far too long. We have only begun to calculate the damage wrought by these interventions. Some imagined harms might not come to be, but others, as yet unimagined, will surely emerge. It is inevitable, given the institutional and media resistance to weighing costs and benefits. .....



.... this got me interested because these claims are, of course, total bunk and yet another example of “fact checking as captured talking point pushing”.

... it is manifestly clear that not only are the vaxxed and boosted getting more covid than the unvaccinated:

... but that this trend is getting worse over time as variants undergo evolution driven by leaky vaccines that have antigenically fixated the purportedly inoculated.

this is likely driving the opposite of herd immunity. it’s driving herd antigenic fixation and perpetual vulnerability.

many states are starting to try to adulterate and hide the data on outcomes here.

..... THIS study is devastating. (and the lead author, dean follmann, is from the NIAID, fauci’s fiefdom)

the key finding is here: ...

.. in simple layman’s terms, this is showing you serious suppression of immune system training. mRNA vaccines do not train your immune system to recognize the nucleocapsid of SARSCOV. they cannot. they do not contain it. they contain instructions to teach your cells to express proteins on their surfaces that look like those created by cells infected with covid19 and to then elicit (and intensify) and immune response. this is a narrow, intense form of immune training.

it is also why, many have posited, these vaccines have proven so unable to provide sterilizing immunity. because this is an after effect. it’s akin to training your night watchman to recognize a burning building, but not an arsonist. until the fire gets lit, he won’t react, even if the arsonist is still standing right next to it. he’s never seen one. he does not know what an arsonist is.

exposure to live virus should teach him. the result of this learning is the ability and propensity to produce N antibodies against the nucleocapsid of the virus itself. now you WILL attack arsonists as soon as you see them.

93% of untreated who got the virus acquired this ability.

but only 40% of those who took the moderna vaccine and were then exposed to live virus did.

nearly 6 in 10 (57%) of those vaccinated who would have been expected to generate these antibodies did not.

welcome to OAS/antigenic fixation, population: probably you.

.... so, yes, expect a stunning pivot in the US. this is well past “inconvenient truth” and inching toward “we’re going down in history as the worst villains in the history of public health.”

expect to see heaven and earth moved to stop that from emerging.

but i doubt the charade can last. signs are becoming too blatant and the effects over months and years will be too clear.


Charts:



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Fauci, [circa March 2020]: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”

Rose, [re: Fisman paper discussed above by Bridle]: My take? The point of publishing a low level piece of writing like this is to create division. It is that simple. There is no scientific merit in this piece (I will demonstrate this) and the message is not science-based

Rigger: what interests me is the failure of intuition. It may be that I’m just an idiot (high probability), but where have we seen this failure of intuition before? Lockdowns and masks have a certain intuitive appeal. Our ‘intuition’ screams at us they ought to work. But they don’t. It’s only when we dig a little deeper, and in the case of masks not all that much deeper, do we begin to appreciate why our initial intuitions were all to cock (as we might say in the North of England).

Campbell: re: Denmark cancelling all COVID vaccinations: “Isn’t it great to see a national medical leader with the sheer guts to reflect the accurate science. It’s just excellent. Very very pleased to see the courage that Tyra Krause has demonstrated.”


CO-VIDs of the [Next] Week:

*** COVID Revealed ***

EXPOSING LIES & MISINFORMATION
REVEALING THE TRUTH

VIEWING STARTS TUESDAY MAY 3RD

SIMPLY CLAIM YOUR SEAT TO WATCH THE ENTIRE SERIES - FOR FREE

Register to watch for FREE during the limited-time online release, before it goes on sale.


Anecdotal Fare:

In memory of those who "died suddenly" in the United States, April 19-25 (Part 2)



‘What I’ve Seen in the Last 2 Years Is Unprecedented’: Physician on COVID Vaccine Side Effects on Pregnant Women
Former Pfizer VP: 'Adverse impacts on conception and ability to sustain a pregnancy were foreseeable'



COVID Corporatocracy / Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

Spartacus: COVID-19 Deep Dive Part VII: Smart Cities and Neo-Malthusianism




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

****************** Lawrence: "The 'defactualization' of America."
Ukraine as mirror.

It is perfectly obvious by now, to anyone who cares to look, that mainstream media in America and the other Western powers are not reporting the Ukraine crisis accurately.

Let me try that another way: The government-supervised New York Times and the rest of the corporate-owned media on both sides of the Atlantic lie routinely to their readers and viewers as to why Russia intervened in Ukraine, the progress of its military operation, the conduct of Ukrainian forces, and America’s role in purposely provoking and prolonging this crisis.

So far as I know, this is the first war in modern history with no objective, principled coverage in mainstream media of day-to-day events and their context. None. It is morn-to-night propaganda, disinformation and lies of omission—most of it fashioned by the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime in Kiev and repeated uncritically as fact.

There is one thing worse than this degenerate state of affairs. It is the extent to which the media’s malpractice is perfectly fine to most Americans. Tell us what to think and believe no matter if it is true, they say, and we will think and believe it. Show us some pictures, for images are all. 

There are larger implications to consider here. Critical as it is that we understand this conflict, Ukraine is a mirror in which we see ourselves as we have become. For more Americans than I wish were so, reality forms only in images. These Americans are no longer occupants of their own lives. Risking a paradox, what they take to be reality is detached from reality.

This majority — and it is almost certainly a majority — has no thoughts or views except those first verified through the machinery of manufactured images and “facts.” Television screens, the pages of purportedly authoritative newspapers, the air waves of government-funded radio stations—NPR, the BBC—serve to certify realities that do not have to be real, truths that do not have to be true.

..... The two months that have passed since the Russian intervention on 24 February have been shocking on both these counts. The derelictions of the press and broadcasters are without precedent in my lifetime, and with Vietnam, the Iraq War, and the covert operation in Syria among the wreckage in the rearview mirror, this is saying something.

I will let the American public’s enthusiasm for the sinkhole that is Ukraine, the Azov Battalion, and the ridiculous posturing of President Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian who is no longer funny, speak for itself. .....

... We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Ghost of Kiev and Snake Island turn out now to be mere prelude, opening acts in the most extensive propaganda operation of the many I can recall.

...... [re:Bucha]: In my read this is yet another of the false flags the Kiev regime flies almost by the day now. Paying-attention people will not miss the striking similarity between these incidents and the numerous put-up jobs that featured in Washington’s covert operation in Syria

.... We have been told once again what to think and believe, and most of us will think and believe it.



Quick recap for those who haven't followed what's been going on in Ukraine but want to understand: 

02/24: The Russians invaded from the south, south-east, east and north, in a lightning campaign. The Russians invaded with 190K troops—against 250K combat troops from Ukraine.

The RF put 30K troops near Kiev—nowhere near enough to capture the city—but enough to pin down some 100K AFU defenders. The RF also launched several axes of attack, with reinforcements on standby (including a famed 40km long tank column), to see where they might be needed.

Crucially—the Russian's blitz on several axes pre-empted an imminent UKRAINIAN blitzkrieg. The AFU had been about to invade the Donbas. This was the immediate motivation for Russia's invasion: To beat them to the punch and scuttle Ukraine's imminent invasion—which they did.

Also, by attacking from the north and south, the Russians disrupted weapons supply chain from NATO. Had the RF only attacked in the east to prevent the AFU invasion of Donbas, there would have been an open corridor for resupply from the West. Threatening Kiev stopped that.
So the main AFU army was left stranded in east Ukraine, with the rest of the Ukr. forces isolated and pinned down—with no easy resupply from the West. The RF then went about hitting AFU command/control and resupply links, further isolating and immobilizing Ukrainian forces.

The Russians soon nominally controlled land the size of the UK in Ukraine—but it was a tenuous control. The south of Ukraine was more fully in Russia's grip. The AFU around Kherson simply scattered. Mariupol became a clear battleground, as did the Donbas proper.

What the Russians initially wanted was to:

Short-circuit the imminent Donbas invasion - which they did.
Scare the Zelensky regime into negotiating a political settlement - which they failed to do.

Kiev had no intention of negotiating a ceasefire because of orders given to them from Washington: “Fight Russia to the last Ukrainian!” Also, the Neo-Nazi goons around Zelensky threatened him if he negotiated and surrendered because they are terrified of the Russians.

So Zelensky launched a massive PR and propaganda campaign, primarily to motivate AFU forces to fight to the death. Myths were created (Ghost of Kiev), false flags were carried out (Bucha, Kramatorsk) and relentless media stories were flogged relentlessly.

The Russians kept negotiating and trying to NOT destroy Ukraine infrastructure. In fact at first they were even trying to minimize AFU casualties. The evidence for this is overwhelming: The RF did not hit civilian infrastructure - water, electric, phone, transportation. They did not hit AFU barracks, command centers, government buildings, etc.

The Russians' initial priority was for a *negotiated settlement*. But by late March, they realized this was impossible.

This is why the RF withdrew from Kiev. There was no sense putting men near the city when they were not doing what they were supposed to do - putting political pressure on the Zelensky regime to negotiate. This withdrawal was claimed as a “victory” in the “Battle of Kiev”! lmao

Starting in late March, the Russians pulled back and solidified their control over the area they had captured, ceding to the AFU areas that were either pointless to or potentially too costly to control. The Ukraine propaganda machine called all these pull- backs “victories”.

There was still a glimmer that the war might end in a negotiated settlement but that ended in early April. After the Istanbul talks of 3/30, the Ukraine side gingerly agreed to some compromises but within a week publicly disavowed those concessions.

That's when the Russians realized the Zelensky regime was agreement-incapable: Their Washington masters, Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken in particular, wouldn't allow a peace. They want this war to sap Russia dry. It is a classic proxy war and Ukraine will pay the price.

Something else the Russians realized: Sanctions. They hurt but Russia bounced back with remarkable speed. They didn't really hurt that bad. But the theft of Russia's $300 billion in foreign reserves by the West DID hurt - badly. The Russians realized they were in a total war with the West and since their foreign reserves were lost forever (likely to be pilfered by corrupt Western politicos), the Russians now have nothing left to lose. By stealing their reserves, the West lost all power over Russia.

This has sealed Ukraine's fate: The Russians now have no incentive to give up what they have conquered. It has cost them too much in terms of men and treasure. And they know that they can't negotiate a ceasefire. The Zelensky regime will simply break it later.

Which means:

The Russians intend to conquer and permanently annex all the south and east of Ukraine. This is why their strategy on the battlefield has dramatically shifted: Now they are carrying out a slow, methodical grinding down and destruction of the AFU. .....

... The great tragedy is that so many THOUSANDS of young men will die, and die NEEDLESSLY!!,  in order to postpone the inevitable. These brave boys will have fought so valiantly - and died so young, so cruelly -because of the evil of the Zelensky regime.

That's the hard truth.



As I have noted previously, there is a firewall between what Western major media are reporting daily about the situation in the Russia-Ukraine War and more generally about Russia versus what one sees on Russian state television and reads in the Russian news agencies.  On the advice of a colleague in Washington, I will now as occasion requires post news developments from Russia that Western audiences otherwise are not receiving despite their importance as indicators of where East-West relations are headed and whether we are all likely to survive the coming weeks.

... panelists saw this ‘terrorism’ as a new phase in Ukraine’s hybrid war that is being stage managed from Washington. Panelists made the point that the West has been very lucky till now that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has shown great forbearance by not responding in kind to the vicious war being waged by Washington

... Where will all this end?   It is not headed in a good direction


true? dunno; sound plausible? you bet:

... I direct attention to information released on the Interfax website and carried by Lenta.ru and other major Russian news portals:   the head of Russian External Intelligence (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, has spoken out about Poland’s plans to take control of part of the territory of Ukraine.

According to SVR, Poland is coordinating this issue with the United States. The idea is to establish military and political control by Warsaw over the “its historic territories” which today fall within the boundaries of Ukraine. Poland would introduce its troops into the Western regions of the country under cover of a mission to “protect the territory from Russian aggression.”  Eventually this would be expected to lead to a partition of Ukraine. The Poles would install a friendly government in the territory they control, ousting the Ukrainian nationalists.

..... We may take the possibility of a Polish move of its forces into the Western Ukraine as the kind of intervention that Vladimir Putin had in mind when he said yesterday to legislators gathered in St Petersburg that it would provoke a lightning fast counter blow by Russia.  Meanwhile, a similar possible intervention by Romania in swallowing up Moldova and threatening to overrun the Russian separatist territory of Transnistria which is sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine, could also spark a powerful military response from Moscow. 

The mainspring of history is unwinding spasmodically and destructively.



Having lost to Moscow’s SMO — along with failed sanctions war — the empire of lies and NATO vassals intend to falsely accuse Russian forces of using chemical, biological and/or tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. 

On Saturday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova explained the diabolical plot, saying: “Information by the Russian Defense Ministry published today clearly proves” the following: Hegemon USA “in close coordination with (its subservient) NATO (vassals) moved on to a final stage of plotting provocations in Ukraine which should convince the global community that ‘Russia is using poisonous combat substances and biological agents,’ ” adding: Initial plans to make Russia’s economy scream “didn’t work out.”

“Now (the empire of lies) is moving on to involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD)…” ....

Most probable Scenario No. One: A false flag — what Merriam-Webster calls a “deliberate gross distortion of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic.” Their use has been a US tradition since at least the mid-19th century. 9/11 was the mother of all US false flags to that time 





As Andrei Martyanov has frequently and correctly noted, the U.S. Army and its legacy officers are demonstrating remarkable incompetence in assessing the Russian military. The latest in this parade of clowns is Joel D. Rayburn, a retired Colonel and current fellow at the New American Foundation. I think Andrei would agree that Rayburn is a poster child for the grandiose fecklessness of retired U.S. Army officers. ...


If there is indeed a shift in strategy to another level of confrontation with Russia, we need to know what we’re getting into.

To judge by its latest statements, the Biden administration is increasingly committed to using the conflict in Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia, with as its goal the weakening or even destruction of the Russian state. 

This would mean America adopting a strategy that every U.S. president during the Cold War took great pains to avoid: the sponsorship of war in Europe, bringing with it the acute risk of escalation towards direct military confrontation between Russia and NATO, possibly ending in nuclear catastrophe. ...



With the start of World War III by the United States “declaring” war against Russia by its actions in Ukraine, we have entered a time when the end of time has become very possible.  I am speaking of nuclear annihilation.

........ One hundred-and twenty-four years go by in a flash and it’s still the same old story.  In 1898 the yellow press screamed Spanish devils and today it screams Russian devils.  Then and now the press called for war.  If the human race is still here in another 124 years, time and the corporate media will no doubt have told the same story – war and propaganda’s lies to an insouciant and ignorant population too hypnotized by propaganda to oppose them. This despite the apocalyptic sense that permeates our lives because of demonic technology and its use to transform humans into machines who can’t think clearly enough to perceive reality and realize the threat posed by that quintessential technological invention – nuclear weapons.

This is not uplifting, but it’s true.  The nuclear weapons are primed and ready to fly.  The U.S. insists on its first-strike right to launch them.  It openly declares it is seeking the overthrow of the Russian government.  Russia says it will use nuclear weapons only if its existence is threatened, which has become increasingly so because of U.S. provocations over a long time period and its current expanding arming of Ukraine’s government and its neo-Nazi forces.

The Russian President Vladimir Putin and its Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov have just warned the U.S. that such involvement has made nuclear war a “serious” and “real” risk, in Lavrov’s words “we must not underestimate it,” which is a mild form of diplomatic speech. Putin said that Russia has made all the preparations to respond if it senses a strategic threat to Russia and that response will be “instant, it will be quick.”  The U.S. response is to shrug these statements off, just as it has done so for many years with Putin’s complaints about NATO forces moving up to its border.  Incredibly, Biden has said, “For God’s sake, this man (Putin) cannot remain in power.”

Despite endless media/intelligence anti-Russian propaganda – “a vast tapestry of lies,” to use Harold Pinter’s phrase – many fine writers have provided the historical details to confirm the truth that the U.S. has purposely provoked the Russian war in Ukraine by its actions there and throughout Eastern Europe, which the mainstream media avoid completely. This U.S. aggressive history against Russia is part of a much larger history of imperial hubris extending back to the 19th century.  I will therefore here follow Thoreau’s advice – “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?” – since how many times do people need to hear lies such as “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” in order to justify wars of aggression around the world.  The historical facts are very clear, but facts and history don’t seem to matter to many people. Pinter again, in his Nobel Address, bluntly told the truth about the U.S.’s history of systematic and remorseless war crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”  Which is still the case. ...


Related Vids:

(20 entertainingly informing minutes)


Another well-informed eyewitness tells a few of us what's really happening over there





Orwellian Fare:

When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech's centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves.



CaitOz Fare:

Billionaires Only Come To The Rescue In Movies And Comic Books

.... I’ll start paying attention to Musk’s talk about free speech if and when Twitter stops censoring Russian media and unbans people like Scott Ritter who were removed from the platform for questioning official empire narratives about what’s happening in Ukraine. Until then I’m going to assume he’s at most only interested in protecting speech that doesn’t threaten the powerful like Republican partisan bullshit and hate speech against marginalized groups.

The billionaires are not coming to save us. The idea that they might is a carefully constructed propaganda narrative that we’ve been sold for generations. The leaders of the capitalist class are not going to overturn the systems of oppression and exploitation which form the very foundation of capitalism. Superhero stories are designed to prevent us from realizing that only we the people have the power to rescue ourselves.



Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.

Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked. ...

Don’t make the error of assuming you’ll be aware and informed enough to spot all the lies right away. You’re dealing with the single most advanced and powerful propaganda machine that has ever existed, and you’ve been marinating in its effects your entire life. It takes some time. Even the most aware among us were indoctrinated into the mainstream worldview to some extent earlier in their lives, and to this day most of the information they get about the world has some of its roots and branches in parts of the propaganda matrix.

It takes work to see things clearly enough to form a really truth-based worldview. But unless you do this it’s impossible to be truly anti-war, because you can’t skillfully oppose something you don’t understand. To fight the imperial war machine is to fight the imperial propaganda machine.



If you get the feeling that all this Ukraine flag-waving is one more vapid mainstream propaganda initiative used to manufacture consent for an agenda that has nothing to do with what you’re being told, it’s because that’s exactly what is happening.

❖

If you’re on the side of the US empire on any issue you are on the wrong side. This doesn’t mean the other side is always necessarily in the right, it just means a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by lies, murder and tyranny will always be in the wrong. Yes, it is that simple.

❖

Twitter is nature’s way of dispelling the common misconception that liberals are smart.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Corbyn: There must be an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine followed by a Russian troop withdrawal and agreement between Russia and Ukraine on future security arrangements. All wars end in a negotiation of some sort—so why not now?

Kunstler: That’s right, hard as it is to accept, Operation Z came down on Ukraine because it misbehaved badly, egged-on by delusional war-gamers in Washington, who could only pretend to support Ukraine once the real action started. No amount of chanting Putin-Putin-Putin availed to stop the grinding Russian advance.

Kummer: Analysts in Washington study a culture and find its most primal, barbaric roots, and create a cartoonish caricature of it. With that caricature as a false god, that whole society is turned into a death cult, the perfect, self-destructing weapon against Washington’s rivals. The suicidal nature of Washington’s pawns is deliberate. After Russia is destroyed, there would be no use for a Ukraine anymore, so it is actually better for Ukraine to be destroyed in the process too

Martyanov: The flow of psychopaths into the Western "elites" was reaching its peak right around 1980s and today the combined West lives in a completely distorted reality, especially so in moral terms. Just ask 500,000 Iraqi children how it feels. 

Batiushka: The present conflict in the Ukraine is clearly not really about the Ukraine – that artificial collection of territories is only a tragic battlefield between the West and the Rest. The conflict is about the organised violence and extraordinary arrogance of the West, the US/UK/EU/NATO, against the rest of the world, specifically Russia, supported by China, India and indeed all other peoples. Therefore, the coming Russian victory in the special operation in the Ukraine essentially signifies the end of the West’s 500-year long domination of the planet. This is why the tiny Western world, some 15% of the planet, is so virulent in its opposition to the Russian people. The Russian victory will undermine the remnants of illusory faith in the mythical superiority of the West and above all in the USA, fear of which long discouraged the resistance of the ‘Rest’ to the West. 

Brenner: “it is manifestly obvious that our society is not capable of conducting an honest, logical, reasonably informed discourse on matters of consequence. Instead, we experience fantasy, fabrication, fatuousness and fulmination.”

Garcia: In other news, Big Oil is paradoxically balking at Joe Biden's kind offer to drill baby drill the whole world into extinction. The reason? The oil companies are afraid they won't be able to keep fuel prices and their profits high enough if they extract too much.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Yarvin: Autocracy and cultural peace
"Just as every cop bleeds blue, every imperial staffer bleeds purple."


Thoughts on Elon Musk Buying Twitter, and the Simple Case for Rich Guys as the Answer to Neurotic Bureaucratic Tyranny

In his response to my “Why is Everything Liberal?”, Scott Alexander noticed that I made something of a case for Caesarism. The argument goes that democracy can’t represent the will of the masses, who are indifferent to politics and busy with their own lives. It must therefore reflect the views of an activist/bureaucratic/journalistic class. Some call this the “managerial class,” but I don’t like that term as I think it’s too broad and implies that everyone with a college degree or who works in a white-collar profession is actually taking part in running society. In reality, it’s a very small group that matters, and there’s nothing that guarantees that whatever we call this bureaucratic class will have political preferences that if enacted will help rather than harm society. ... Instead of being ruled by say an unrepresentative 1-2% of the population, you put your trust in one man and his lieutenants who are presumably less neurotic and subject to certain mind viruses than those who would otherwise be running things. That allows everyone else to go about doing things like starting families, going on vacation, and developing hobbies instead of bothering with politics and becoming like the activists who want to ruin everything.

.......... In this model of the world, wokeness is just bureaucratic and institutional responses to whoever causes the most destructive riots and cries the loudest, an insight that can be applied to democracy more broadly. In an ideal world, executives at Twitter would just read well-argued pieces in online magazines like The Spectator and become convinced that free speech is important. I think that’s unrealistic because we did not get here through argumentation, but through a small minority of activists making the most noise, with the ostensible justifications for whatever institutions have wanted to do to cave in to their pressure coming later. It would be a mistake to see the post hoc justifications themselves – a genuine commitment to equity, an attempt to overcome past discrimination, defending the lives of “trans kids,” etc. – as driving the phenomenon of wokeness or most other Current Things.

.......... Plutocracy is not a perfect system, but if one rich guy just buying Twitter solves the problem of internet speech against the wishes of nearly the entire bureaucratic class, we will have to consider that a strong argument in its favor.


Fun Fare:

The world makes me crazy.
I need a distraction.
Go Raptors!



Pics of the Week:






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