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Saturday, April 2, 2022

2023-04-02

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

Regular Fare:

Kelton: A Free Lunch for Me, but Not for Thee
An ill-reasoned take on MMT

........ “So long as inflation is very low,” Kelly concedes, we “shouldn’t be too scared of using expansionary fiscal or monetary policy.” Thus, inflation is the thing to watch out for, not the deficit per se. Precisely as MMT—though not J.P. Morgan—has always insisted.

As Kelly put it, “MMT starts from an empirical observation that we have had persistent government deficits for decades without any inflation.”1 He points to the 2017 tax cuts, which added nearly $2 trillion to the deficit without sparking an inflation problem. Sending a huge windfall to those at the top of the income distribution didn’t trigger inflation because “the richest 10 percent spent just 64 percent of their after-tax income and saved the rest.” His message is that you can get away with increasing the deficit when the extra money goes to people who don’t really need it.

In contrast, when the pandemic hit, the government put money into the hands of tens of millions of people who actually did need it. The CARES Act, and the two major COVID bills that followed, provided substantial support to those in the bottom 90 percent of the income distributions.



Inflation data continues to come in from various nations indicating an ongoing escalation in prices dominated by energy and cars (in the US), housing and transport (UK), housing and transport (Australia) and so on. The major question I always ask is this: What would you expect to happen after a major global pandemic that has lasted more than 2 years and is still not resolved and which has closed factories, ports, transport networks, made workers sick so they cannot work, choked shipping, kept people at home while governments have to varying extents maintained their income, shifted spending to home maintenance etc away from haircuts, and the rest of it. And then, add an uncompetitive cartel that manipulates supply to gouge profits (OPEC). And on top of all that have some bushfires and floods around the place. And to even top all of that have a character who thinks he is a Tsar invading a neighbour and creating havoc and destruction. What else would you expect? Oh, its all down to QE and fiscal deficits, I hear them say. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) again – now we know those ideas are defunct. We told you so! And repeat. Interest rates have to rise. Repeat. At least the ECB seems to understand the situation more than most, which is something.

In Issue 2 of the 2022 Volume of the – ECB Economic Bulletin – there is an interesting information ‘box’ – Supply chain bottlenecks in the euro area and the United States: where do we stand? 

The Introduction to the Bulletin notes that:

1. “The Russian invasion of Ukraine will have a material impact on economic activity and inflation through higher energy and commodity prices, the disruption of international commerce and weaker confidence” – Yes.

2. “Inflation has continued to surprise on the upside because of unexpectedly high energy costs” – Yes.

3. “Longer‑term inflation expectations across a range of measures have re-anchored at the ECB’s inflation target” – Yes. Read again!

4. “The Governing Council sees it as increasingly likely that inflation will stabilise at its 2% target over the medium term” – Yes. Read again! That means transitory!

It also means that QE and fiscal policy is not driving this episode.

It also means that rising interest rates will do nothing to bring the inflation rate down and may actually exacerbate it by adding to unit costs.

5. “Supply bottlenecks are expected to start easing during 2022 and to fully unwind by 2023” – Maybe. Transitory drivers! (Hopefully if we get through the virus).

6. “The impact of the massive energy price shock on people and businesses may be partly cushioned by drawing on savings accumulated during the pandemic and by compensatory fiscal measures” – Yes. Note the need for compensatory fiscal measures, which do not mean extra stimulus, but real income protection to avoid a recession compounding the real income losses from the temporary inflation. 

7. “Energy inflation, which reached 31.7% in February, continues to be the main reason for the high overall rate of inflation and is pushing up prices across many other sectors. Food prices have also increased, owing to seasonal factors, elevated transportation costs and higher fertiliser prices. Energy costs have risen further in recent weeks and there will be more pressure on some food and commodity prices owing to the war in Ukraine” – Yes.

All interrelated and not much to do with demand-side pressures.

There is some uncertainty as to the duration of this inflationary episode – “given the role of temporary pandemic-related factors and the indirect effects of higher energy prices.”

8. “Various measures of longer-term inflation expectations derived from financial markets and from surveys stand at around 2%” – Yes.

So no-one is really thinking that the inflation is anything but a transitory, ephemeral episode driven by various extraordinary factors that will eventually abate.

How long before abatement?

Uncertain.

Doesn’t that stretch the meaning of transitory?

Not at all.

Transitory doesn’t mean short-term necessarily. It means as long as the extraordinary events are driving the show....


Raoul Pal tweet thread: Macro Thoughts:

We know we have a massive supply shock. We also know that ESG is a demand shock. This is getting people concerned that the secular trend has tipped towards inflation. I have considerable sympathy with that view but... 1/

I note that the biggest commodity demand shock the world has ever seen was the building of China. The largest ever demand for commodities. This was offset by cheap goods. Outcome was 2.8% averaged inflation from 2000 to 2008 (falling to 2% post-China boom). 2/

Commodity prices increase 300%

The biggest supply shock in all history was after World War 2. It was also one of the biggest demand shocks from the Marshall Plan and fiscal stimulus. Inflation at first rose sharply, then collapsed with recession. Trend  inflation 1.8%. Technology was the inflation offset.

The largest ever finished good demand shock was the Baby boom generation hitting 30 years old. That gave the most persistently high inflation seen in the developed world for centuries - the only time.

The facts that will all play together this time are supply issues (from Russia, Covid and de-globalization), demand shocks in some areas from ESG shifts. These will battle the massive deflationary trends demographics, debt and technology.

It is far from clear how this all plays out. My guess is that we settle into a 2% to 3% inflation range after this current massive gyration (shipping, rail, road, ports have all started freeing). Commodity inflation will drive up the cost of green initiatives...

Extending their payback period but overtime the cost collapses as technology advances. I think the food situation is a temporary phenomenon as food supply is incredibly elastic. I'm not sure that finished good prices keep inflating or building costs.

We need to price in the cyclicality of demand too. It looks like we are going to see weaker economic growth and that will ease a lot of pressures. We don't yet know how far. I suspect more than people expect currently.

It is a real complex macro world out there. 
No one has the answers as this is a unique set of events but one thing Im pretty sure of - Nothing is Written and time will reveal all.


What Does a Bond Bear Market Look Like?



The financial press currently is obsessed with the significance of the slope of the Treasury yield curve, because it's thought that a flat or inverted curve is a predictor of recession.

Sure, a flat or inverted yield curve almost always precedes a recession, and I've been making that point for many years. But you need other things going on to make a recession happen. Inverted curves are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a recession. The following charts illustrate 4 other important indicators of an impending recession.

Chart #1 compares the slope of the Treasury yield (measured by the difference between 1-yr yields and 10-yr yields) to the level of real short-term interest rates. Note that two things reliably precede recessions: a flat or inverted yield curve (red line) and very high real interest rates (blue line). The yield curve inverts when the market senses that the Fed is so tight that the economy is at risk of collapsing, and that collapse would then prompt the Fed to ease. As many have noted, there are parts of the yield curve that today are inverted: 5-yr Treasury yields today closed at 2.50%, while 10-yr yields closed at 2.40%. But it would be premature to think that this materially increases the chances of a near-term recession.



... The yield curve is sending a message that investors should not ignore. Furthermore, it is a good bet that “risk-based” investors will likely act sooner than later. Of course, the contraction in liquidity causes the decline, which will eventually exacerbate the economic contraction. 

Despite commentary to the contrary, the yield curve is a “leading indicator” of what is happening in the economy currently, as opposed to economic data, which is “lagging” and subject to massive revisions. ...



In just 18 months, median home prices surged 26.5 percent, from $322,600 at the end of the second quarter of 2020 (or “2020Q2”) to $408,100 in 2021Q4.

That price surge, together with the higher interest rates the Fed promises now, makes a huge difference in buyers’ options and their monthly payments.

Let’s compare mortgage payments for the $322,600 in 2020Q2 and the $408,100 in 2021Q4 using a 20 percent down-payment and the 30-year conventional mortgage national average interest rate, and take no account of points or property taxes.

If one bought the property at the end of 2020Q2, the mortgage carry charge on that loan using the national average 30 year 3.07 percent interest rate that was in effect at the end of 2020Q2, buyers would make a $64,520 down payment and make required monthly payments of  $1,097.84.

If one bought the property at the end of 2021Q4, the mortgage carry charge on that loan using the national average 30 year 3.11 percent interest rate that was in effect at the end of 2020Q2, buyers would make a $81,620 down payment and make required monthly payments of  $1,395.90, or 27 percent more than in 2020Q2. But if the same mortgage terms were secured just last week, March 24, after the Fed raised their rate by a quarter-point, when rates spiked to 4.42 percent, the payment would be $1,638.74, an incredible 49 percent more than at 2020Q2—in just 18 months! 

...........

This will also have demographic effects. Family formation is likely to decrease as middle-income couples will be far less able to afford the enormous costs of rearing children and have less time to participate in parenting. Our demographics—which were already in a bad place before the pandemic—will suffer even more. As a consequence, the generation that would normally come into its own in 2045 or so won’t be nearly as robust as it would otherwise be.

Of all the knock-on effects of the pandemic and the Fed’s management of its balance sheet, this intergenerational effect is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous



Prices for some of the world’s most pivotal products – foods, fuels, plastics, metals – are spiking beyond what many buyers can afford. That’s forcing consumers to cut back and, if the trend grows, may tip economies already buffeted by pandemic and war back into recession.



We have heard much about the supply chain crisis as we recover from the pandemic recession. As the economy has bounced back there have been shortages of many items with the economy unable to produce and ship the volume of goods that is being demanded. Many of us see this supply chain crisis as the main factor behind the upsurge in inflation that we have witnessed over the last year.

My expectation has been that the many items that have soared in price over the last year will see prices stabilize and fall when the supply chain crunch eases. I have repeatedly used the case of televisions as an example. Television prices had been on a downward path for decades, but the CPI index for televisions rose 8.7 percent between March and August of last year. The index then turned around, and has since dropped by 6.3 percent, reversing most of the prior increase.

Used cars provide another example. Used car prices soared in 2020 and 2021, with the index rising by more than 50 percent between February 2020 and January 2022. However, prices began falling in February. In one private price index, by the middle of March, used car prices had fallen almost 6.0 percent from their January peak.

If we see a comparable price decline in other items that have had extraordinary runups in prices in the last year, like appliances, clothing, and household furnishing, it will sharply dampen the inflation rate going forward. The key factor in this story is resolving the supply chain crisis.

This is where inventories come in. ....

... it is worth noting that overall consumption is not especially high right now. Overall consumption in January, the last month for which we have data, was 5.0 percent higher, after adjusting for inflation, than in the fourth quarter of 2019. This implies a 2.3 percent annual rate of growth, pretty much in line with longer term trends.

While overall consumption is not out of line with its longer-term trend, demand for goods is. Durable goods consumption was 25.7 percent higher in January than in the fourth quarter of 2019 and consumption of non-durables was 13.0 percent higher, implying respective annual growth rates of 10.9 percent and 5.7 percent. If consumption of goods falls back closer to its trend growth path, then we will see an inventory glut.



... These data suggest that in many categories of goods, we should have a very adequate supply in the not distant future. This will be especially true if we see consumption of goods and services revert to more normal patterns.

In this respect it is worth noting that large bursts of goods consumption tend to be followed by lower consumption in future periods. If people buy a new car or refrigerator in 2021, they are not likely to buy another car or refrigerator in 2022 or 2023. The huge burst of goods consumption that we saw in 2020 and 2021 should be another factor, in addition to the winding down of the pandemic, leading to a shift to services.

In short, the inventory data indicate that we should be getting to the end of shortages due to supply chain problems. This doesn’t mean that there will not still be many items, most notably new cars, that are in short supply, but these will be the exception rather than the rule. In that story, we will likely see price declines in a wide range of items, pulling down inflation in the rest of 2022.



... So we now have an experiment underway again. Most central banks are buckling under the pressure the financial markets are putting on them to raise interest rates. But the Bank of Japan, and to a lesser extent the ECB are not. We will see how that plays out. I think the Bank of Japan has its finger on the pulse and the other central banks are going down the wrong path. ...

... For the record, I think the Bank of Japan is once again demonstrating a superior capacity to conduct macroeconomic policy. It is supporting a fiscal policy stance that cares about keep unemployment low and maintaining first-class public services. ...


Richard D. Wolff, Michael Hudson – Grab Bag Imperialism

includes interview transcript






.... And the aftermath of the Ukraine conflict will clearly accelerate that drive by Russia and China as they face severe and long-standing sanctions in trade and money markets that will reduce their access to the dollar and the euro.

But there is still no real alternative in international markets to the US dollar.  First, there can be no return to gold as the international money commodity; and the role of international money as created by the IMF in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) is minimal; while it’s a volatile future with other potential monetary assets like cryptocurrencies. ..... 

.................... A revival of a new ‘Bretton Woods’ is not possible in the 21st century.  There is increasingly no dominant economic power that can dictate terms to others; and this is no ‘golden age’ of high profitability that all the major economies can share in.  On the contrary, the profitability of capital in the major economies is near 50-year lows and the dominance of the big four currencies in world capitalist markets is fragmenting into a myriad of small currency regimes (as the IMF suggests).

Don’t’ get me wrong, the dollar still sits in the driving seat in world markets.  Indeed, in global slumps and in geopolitical crises, the dollar becomes the strongest among fiat currencies, alongside gold as the world’s commodity currency. And that’s especially the case when interest rates look set to rise more in the US than in other major economies.





Last week, Ghana’s central bank announced its biggest ever interest-rate hike as it sought to slow rampant inflation that threatens to create a debt crisis in one of West Africa’s largest economies.  The Bank of Ghana raised its main lending rate by 250 basis points to 17% as consumer inflation reached 15.7% year-on-year in February, the highest since 2016. The war in Ukraine will likely make things worse. Ghana imports nearly a quarter of its wheat from Russia and around 60% of its iron ore from Ukraine.

Ghana is just one example of the economic stress being placed on small, low-income economies around the world from food and energy inflation, rising interest rates and a strong dollar....

..... both the IMF and the World Bank have warned, many countries are emerging from the COVID pandemic slump with a large debt overhang that could crippled their economies if they are forced by creditors, both private and public, to repay.  And while many of these countries are small in GDP size, they are huge in population.  The IMF’s debt database shows that the external debt stock of low- and middle income countries in 2020 rose, on average, 5.6 percent to $8.7 trillion. However, for many countries the increase was in double digits. 

... In sum, debts to foreign investors and financial institutions owed by the Global South have accelerated during the COVID pandemic and ‘debt relief’ has been no such thing.  Now the Ukraine conflict is increasing the risk of defaults and economic recession for these countries as inflation spirals, interest rates rise and economic growth falls away.

... Ultimately, the only way poor countries can reduce their exploitation by multi-nationals and international finance is through state control of their banking and strategic sectors of their economies.  That, of course, is anathema to international capital.



.... Some companies have recalled workers to the office, at the least for a few days every week. But many haven’t, and perhaps never will. About seven months into the COVID pandemic, I questioned what the future of work would look like, “employee productivity is up. There have been enormous savings from lack of business travel and reduced real estate costs for many companies. We now know that, for the most part, we do have the technology infrastructure to support remote working at scale. This convergence of technology, employee productivity, and increased profitability for companies means that, for many people, some version of our current home office life will continue indefinitely.” A year and a half later, there’s no doubt that, while people miss some of the social aspects of on-site working, there are lots of things they don’t miss.

... If workers are more productive and companies are saving money on real estate and travel, why are any companies bringing workers back? This Atlantic article suggests that it’s because managers fear remote workers, “Some of the people loudly calling for a return to the office are not the same people who will actually be returning to the office regularly. The old guard’s members feel heightened anxiety over the white-collar empires they’ve built, including the square footage of real estate they’ve leased and the number of people they’ve hired.” The article posits that perhaps the real issue for managers is that “Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.”

... My company seems to be finding a similar middle ground that many companies are: you don’t have to come to the office every day but we’ll do team meetings and collaboration sessions in person. If this hybrid working style does become the norm for many people and businesses, there should be an opportunity to rethink office spaces. ...



After a Thursday report that Goldman Sachs bankers are threatening to quit over a requirement that they report to the office 5 days a week, a new report reveals the lengths to which management is now going to convince their staff to comply.





QsOTW:

rule of thumb #1: never agree with Larry Summers;
rule of thumb #2: never abandon rule #1

Grannis: In the past I have rarely agreed with Larry Summers, but in an interview last week with Bloomberg, he expressed similar views. We both think that as a first approximation, the Fed needs to raise short-term rates to at least 4-5%. I think we would both agree that ultimately, the Fed needs to raise rates until they are above the rate of inflation. Negative real rates are inflationary, since they make borrowing (which is what expands the money supply) profitable.

Blain: In bonds there is pain as prices tumble – but that does not change the fundamentals of investing in bonds. The risk is rising bond yields will expose the dangerous over-valuations low rate distortion has caused across other financial-assets, perhaps causing more than a few bubbles to pop.

Every: There Is No Reality-Denying, Can-Kicking Delusion Stocks Cannot Embrace, Snort, Or Main-Line

Hayes: I am 100% certain that there will be a financial crisis of epic proportions predicated on losses faced by commodity producers and traders who touch every aspect of the globalised financial system. You cannot remove the world’s largest energy producer — and the collateral these commodity resources represent — from the financial system without serious unimagined and unintended consequences.

Zen: Sadly, having your head up your own ass is not a Black Swan event. 

MacroOps: The financial world is chock full of noise and nonsense. It’s filled with smart people who don’t know a damn thing about how the world really works. The financial system’s incentive structure is set up so that as long as analysts sound smart and pretend like they know why stock xyz is going up, they get rewarded. This holds true for all the talking heads and “experts” except for those who actually trade real money. They either learn the game or get competed out.

Hayes2: The zenith of the fiduciary is upon us. Never before in the history of human civilisation has a class of individuals been able to reap so much economic benefit for themselves against a backdrop of disastrous performance for the clients they claim to serve. The global class of financial fiduciaries shroud their poor performance in a gilded cloak of incomprehensible financial jargon.


Other Charts: (source links: one, two, three, four-six, seven-eight, nine-ten)
1:


2:

3:

4-6:



7-8:

9-10:




Bubble Fare:


The biggest asset bubble in U.S. history was blown with the Fed printing $120 billion a month and short term rates at zero while the government concurrently ran a record fiscal deficit and inflation was moderate.

Now we have no Fed printing (in fact, its balance sheet may soon be reduced), almost the entire Treasury rate curve well over 2%, rapidly declining fiscal deficits, and the highest inflation rate in over 40  years, exacerbated (and not yet in the latest inflation numbers) by the tragic situation in Ukraine via further supply chain restrictions, while increased military spending for the entire western world (as well as Japan and South Korea) is about to erase the so-called “peace dividend.” 

Thus, in addition to our Tesla short, late in the month (and for the first time in many years) I initiated a short position in the S&P 500 (via the SPY ETF) when it bounced back to within 5% of the all-time high it set in early January under far more favorable conditions than those in the present and foreseeable future. 

In fact, the last time the 10-year Treasury yield was where it is now (approximately 2.3%) was May 2019 when the S&P 500 was approximately 35% lower than now, yet inflation was vastly lower and growth prospects were far better. And although corporate earnings are higher now than they were in 2019, I believe inflation expectations will soon substantially lower the PE multiples placed on those earnings, as occurred in the inflationary era between 1973 and 1975 when the S&P 500’s PE rapidly dropped from 18x to 8x.

In other words, I think this stock market is going a lot lower, and I want to be positioned for that. 



Equities markets, especially when they turn acutely speculative, become fixated on short-term trading dynamics. How bearish is sentiment? How aggressive has short positioning become? What is the scope of outstanding put options and bearish derivatives that would need to be unwound (aka “gamma squeeze”) in the event of a market rally? What is the speculative landscape heading into option expiration? Equities will move on incremental news. When it appeared less likely the War was spiraling out of control, it was time to squeeze the shorts and force an unwind of bearish derivative positions. Longer-term developments – including a momentous reshaping of the “world order” – are essentially irrelevant to stocks.

Meanwhile, bonds tend to have a longer horizon. Why are long-term real (adjusted for inflation) yields remaining so deeply negative – 10-year yields at only 2.39% - with almost 8% y-o-y consumer price inflation and the Fed commencing what is expected to be the most hawkish tightening cycle since 1994? And with the 2-yr/10-yr Treasury yield spread trading negative this week, some interpret this as a signal of looming recession. I would approach the analysis somewhat differently.

I have posited that long-term yields have remained depressed in the face of surging inflation largely because of today’s world of extraordinary Bubble Fragility. China’s historic Bubble is clearly faltering, and the prospect of weakening Chinese demand was cited this week as a factor behind sinking crude and materials prices. In general, global financial markets are at heightened risk of de-risking/deleveraging, along with a crisis of confidence that would likely stop global central bank “tightening” in its tracks.

It has been my long-held concern that a bursting Chinese Bubble would be associated with heightened geopolitical risk. This thesis is coming to fruition. I don’t see the timing of Russia’s invasion as coincidence. China and the world are transitioning from a historic boom and Bubble period. Animosity and conflict are inescapable cycle shift fallout.


With equities rallying despite soaring commodities and rising bond yields, we can eliminate one more suspect for the continuing equity rally and US dollar strength.

One of the reasons I left the money management game was that many of the theories that I had used to manage money stopped working. Some of them were original, some I taken from others, and some I had modified. I knew I need to take time off and have a think. I also knew that I needed to read different books to get my mind thinking differently. As it happens, I have just finished reading Agatha Christies “Death on the Nile” (excellent book), and I particularly enjoyed how he looked at all the clues, organized them, and then slowly but surely eliminate suspects until only the murderer, however unlikely, was left.

For me, recent market action has eliminated the final suspect for what has caused the extremely long lived bull market in US equities. I had speculated that robustness of the US stock market was a feature of extremely loose credit conditions. These loose credit conditions were only possible due to a long drawn out commodity bear market, and hence if we had a spike in commodity prices which led to rising bond yields, then were likely to see a much weaker equity market.

Commodity prices, and particularly food prices have spiked. Food prices had spiked in 1996 before the Asian Financial Crisis, again in 2007 before the GFC and in 2011 during the Eurocrisis. My working assumption was that another spike would also signal problems. But with the exception of Chinese equities, major equity market returns over last 12 months have been robust. MSCI World is barely 5% from highs.

..... I realised that I needed to look at all this clues again, and have a think about why they worked before, but did not work this time. And, by eliminating suspects, and having a long think, I think I have the answer. The murderer of all possible bear markets in the US dollar and US equity is….. (to be continued).



Why we have never felt more bearish in our 25 years career.

The background:
  1. The US stock market is more overvalued than it has ever been (https://research.nava.capital/market-valuations/) which in itself has little influence on short-term market gyrations. To this we must add that the Grantham behavioral PE ratio (trying to justify higher PE ratios by low volatility, macro and ROE volatility) is now indicating that the markets are way too high as well.
  2. Debt level around the world is the highest it has even been (https://blogs.imf.org/2021/12/15/global-debt-reaches-a-record-226-trillion/) and much of this debt has been raised for unproductive use (buyback of existing capital, fiscal largess for short term consumption,…) while the stock of capital has failed to raise as much, by a wide margin (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/central-bank-enablers-global-instability-damien-cleusix).
  3. Central Banks uber-expansive monetary policies have failed to see the imbalance develop and are over-confident on the strength of the financial system. They think that because banks, especially in the US are better capitalized, because household and non-financial companies balance sheet appear strong, that everything will be fine.
  4. Banks are stronger but this time the lending spree is occurring elsewhere, in less regulated entities and that can only end badly (https://www.ft.com/content/7bd7a109-2dd5-4d3b-ba7a-5fb8ad25ed45).
Households and non-financial companies’ health are deceiving. First you must analyze the distribution. Few households own an incommensurate share of assets and few companies earn an incommensurate share of profits. The asset side of both balance sheet contain many items whose valuation are in unchartered territory so every debt to asset ratios looks good by definition. Don’t be fooled.

One of the poster children of increasing debt for the purchase of existing capital is buybacks and M&A. While both can be justified when they are done in a price sensitive, opportunistic way, today’s binge buying cannot be justified (https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/10/23/the-dangers-of-buybacks-mitigating-common-pitfalls/).

Buybacks and dividends are not yet siphoning 100 % of operating earnings (https://www.yardeni.com/pub/bbdivepsyield.pdf) but remember that earnings have been pushed way above trend thanks to the huge recent fiscal deficits which are now waning (https://twitter.com/hussmanjp/status/1500947365620027393?s=20&t=4xkKStm0GGef6Ti-62KgRA). 

.....

OK now enough for the background and let’s look at what has been happening recently
  • In November, our LT warning models (we have many of them) triggered sell signal one after the other. We ended up with a total which was making the other historical precedent (beginning of 2000, Summer 2007, Spring 2015, September 2018 and December 2019) look trivial.
  • Since the start of the year we have witnessed a flurry of +1% and -1% days. When we see such concentration of volatility after a long period of calm, the probability is high that we have entered a cyclical bear market.
  • The Fed which has been the chief enabler of the current massive bubble seems to understand that it is now cornered and won’t be able, as long as inflation remains high, to offer the now expected Fed put anytime soon. J. Powell even said that it could continue to raise rate in a recession if inflation remains sticky. The Fed restrictive policy will not be limited to aggressively raise rate but with an accelerated Quantitative Tightening. We doubt that it will deliver everything the market expect if a cyclical bear market materialize but the damage to investors psychology would be large enough that even a reversal would not save the market immediately.
  • This brings us to the recession debate. While our recession indicators have yet to flash a definitive signal, most of them are very close to trigger. Given what we have said about the Fed above and the fragility of the markets, our guess is that the lead time of those indicators will be shorter than what they have been historically and the recession could well start in 2022 in the US. It is significant because bear markets tend to be much more severe when a recession occurs (https://www.yardeni.com/pub/stmktsp500recess.pdf)
...



Today's policy-makers are racing full speed towards the Minsky meltdown: ....

The pandemic and its *special* bailout programs allowed companies that were essentially insolvent to rollover their debts. 

One, more, time. 

The Fed missed their window to raise rates, and now they are tightening into a deleveraging phase 

... The Fed is flooring their rate hike plans while keeping their eyes firmly locked on the rear view mirror of stale and irrelevant data. They are in Thelma & Louise end of cycle policy disaster mode.

... Never before have we seen such a large collapse in consumer sentiment BEFORE an asset crash and before Fed rate hikes. One can only imagine what depth of despair awaits this crime scene when asset collapse stirs the profoundly stoned masses from their narcoleptic coma.

... 
In summary, the full force of Wall Street criminality is arrayed against the public right now. They are intentionally being kept in the dark and fed bullshit. As far as the masses are concerned, they wouldn't have it any other way.

No one wants inconvenient facts and data to get in the way of their opinions. 



FinTech Fare:

The cypherpunks were wrong (but also right)



The Marche Region financed, in March 2021, a tender for the purchase and installation of Controlled Mechanical Ventilation (CMV) systems in school classrooms. The aim was to ensure face-to-face lessons, as the available scientific evidence indicated that Controlled Mechanical Ventilation (CMV) was an effective tool to counter the spread of Sars-CoV-2, reducing the permanence of pollutants in the air.

... It’s clear that the CMV, especially if adequately sized (6 or more air changes-hour), has the ability to reduce the Sars-CoV-2 infection risk by over 80%. 


Complex agreements have done little to reduce emissions in the last 30 years, but a universal tariff could avert catastrophe



As solar gets cheaper (cost price) and ever more energy is produced by solar, energy is getting cheaper and will be even cheaper in the future as prime solar locations still abound. This, however, leads to a follow up question: when cost prices go down and consumer prices go up, who is winning? The answer to this is clear, too. People who invested in solar are winning, but so are oil, gas and coal producing countries (cost prices of oil, gas and coal won’t change to much when consumer prices are going up) while owners of oil, coal and gas will also have HUGE windfall profits. The free Cash Flow of Shell alone increased from $ 0.9 billion in Q4 2020 to, ahem, $ 10,7 billion in Q4 2021. As this is free cash flow, all of this money could have been invested in the cheapest kind of energy available: solar! Instead of this, Shell is buying back shares and divesting… The investments of Shell are clearly not very efficient.(wonkish note: the Shell press release is an unorderly mess, still using fuzzy indicators like EBITDA and the like). But the point: consumers pay the price while average costs have stayed more or less the same… Let me be clear: I do not mind high fuel prices (high prices for heating and electricity at home are another issue). But let these be high because of taxes, not because of windfall profits. Shell uses the profits to buy back shares… A less future oriented business strategy is hard to imagine.








Snowpack is at 38% of average for this time of year.





Other Fare:


In order to agree on an interpretation, we first have to agree on the facts. Even when we agree on the facts, the available set of facts may admit multiple interpretations. This was an obvious and widely accepted truth early in my career*. Since then, the field has decayed into a haphazardly conceived set of unquestionable absolutes that are based on a large but well-curated subset of facts that gratuitously ignores any subset of facts that are inconvenient.

Sadly, we seem to have entered a post-truth period in which facts are drowned out by propaganda. I went into science to get away from people who place faith before facts, and comfortable fictions ahead of uncomfortable truths. Unfortunately, a lot of those people seem to have followed me here.

... Indeed, a recent experience taught me a new psychology term: identity protective cognition. Identity protective cognition is the tendency for people in a group to selectively credit or dismiss evidence in patterns that reflect the beliefs that predominate in their group.


Awareness and a bit of habit hacking can keep you out of a technology tailspin.

THE ACT OF doomscrolling—spinning continuously through bad news despite its disheartening and depressing effects—and social media envy, like the fear of missing out, present greater risks to your health than were previously realized.


Linear modeling has had us searching for coefficient parameter estimates with occasional interaction terms for decades. Here I show the poverty of the polynomial with a lesson for over 90% of science.

If the goal of science is understanding, 240 years of linear modeling has left us like babes in the dark wilderness. The palliations students are offered are poor excuses for an the incompleteness of model selection.

... Due to the propagation of information throughout scientific communities, I estimate that over 90% of science conducted has been impacted by findings from multiple regression or other types of linear models.

One of my complaints about multiple regression - and any form of linear modeling, even simple linear regression - has always been that it has been abused as providing an assessment of both “predictive power” and “explanatory power”. The first claim is bogus because predictions using new data are nearly never done, and the fact that the study data fits itself well is a tautology.

....... Few people realize that the factoring and guesswork we did in our grammar school math classes to find square roots were inexact approximations methods that, to the uninitiated, only felt like math. But that process was not formal math, with axioms and proofs. It was a taste of independent thought in the area of numbers and objects, and an introduction to giving ourselves permission to attempt to problem-solve.

WARNING: DRAGONS AHEAD, TURN BACK NOW

What I’m about to show you will rattle your cage if you’re an academic who is used to thinking in terms of multiple regression models or GLMs. ....

......

Humanity needs to be able to predict better, and acknowledge that we risk more when we pretend to understand. Science is expensive, and errant models are even more costly.



A biological cell becomes cancerous if a certain set of rare mutations all happen in that same cell before its organism dies. This is quite unlikely to happen in any one cell, but a large organism has enough cells to create a substantial chance of cancer appearing somewhere in it before it dies. If the chances of mutations are independent across time, then the durations between the timing of mutations should be roughly equal, and the chance of cancer in an organism rises as a power law in time, with the power equal to the number of required mutations, usually around six.

A similar process may describe how an advanced civilization like ours arises from a once lifeless planet. Life may need to advance through a number of “hard step” transitions, each of which has a very low chance per unit time of happening. Like evolving photosynthesis or sexual reproduction. But even if the chance of advanced life appearing on any one planet before it becomes inhabitable is quite low, there can be enough planets in the universe to make the chance of life appearing somewhere high.



..... A letter from Tudor to Churchill that I recently came across crystallizes all the insouciance, cynicism, greed, callousness, and errant judgment of empire. ...





Powerful geomagnetic storms are set to hit Earth's magnetic field Wednesday night into early Thursday after the sun ejected nearly 20 solar flares from an Earth-facing single sunspot in recent days. 


How your genes influence how many years of school you complete



There are many advantages to being a young man. The problem is that you’re young and you don’t know this yet. In fact, you probably won’t know it until it’s too late to do anything about. If I could go back and do it over again, there are several things I’d do different. I’d spend more time on my calculus homework. I’d drink better beer. I’d spend less time trying to date more women and spend more time trying to get other things accomplished (yeah, sure I would). And I’d apply a few simple things I’ve since learned about training to my own program.

Being young has profound advantages to a guy who wants to get strong, if being young does not also prove to be an insurmountable obstacle to learning how. ....

.... For volume, 5 sets of 5 reps across (the same weight repeated for the work sets) have proven to be the optimum combination of volume and intensity. Higher reps require a weight that is too light; lower reps with a heavier weight do not accumulate to the optimum volume, but cause too much structural stress. Many people have tweaked the sets and reps, and time after time they come back to 5 sets of 5 across as the best driver of long-term progress.


Pics of the Week:


This extraordinary comic is a collaboration between the neuroscientists Uta and Chris Frith, their writer son, Alex, and the artist and graphic novelist Daniel Locke. Have I ever read anything like it before? No, I’m certain that I haven’t. Each page is a visual delight: as colourful and as joyful as a book for children. It’s extremely easy to read and often very funny. And yet you finish it with your mind blown. Simply by virtue of the fact that it makes some pretty cutting-edge brain science seem almost straightforward, it subtly expands the world of the reader. Afterwards, I wasn’t only more attentive to my own thought processes (hmm, I thought, as I watched my hand reach for the bottle of sauvignon); armed with a bit more insight into the way people around me might be thinking, it’s possible that it may also have liberated me, just a little, from some all too human anxieties (what are they thinking? Doesn’t she like me? Why hasn’t he called me?).





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

If environmentalists knew what moms and dads and the rare scientists have determined about vaccines, they might stop identifying primarily as liberals engage in broader rational discourse.

.......... Let them know that the myriad environmental chemicals that we know are associated with autism, from air pollution, lead, pesticides, chlorpyrifos, phthalates, PBDEs, PCBs are on par with other concerns they might not yet know about like acetaminophen following vaccination, and mercury and aluminum in vaccines.


Justin Trudeau’s F-35 Fighter Jet Acquisition Is a Miserable Circus




The Rules About Corruption Just Don't Apply To The Bidens




Collapse Fare:


It’s rare to encounter a new and constructive idea for addressing human overshoot that is not fatally flawed by a lack of understanding of either thermodynamic and geophysical constraints, or the strong genetic behavior to deny unpleasant realities that enabled the human species to emerge and dominate the planet.

For anyone still looking for technically feasible solutions that have a non-zero probability of success for reducing harms from human overshoot I recommend the most recent Planet: Critical podcast in which Rachel Donald interviews Joseph Merz

... 

Key points made include:
  • It is too late to avoid suffering caused by human overshoot.
  • There may still be time to make the future less bad.
  • All actions we might take to reduce future suffering require changes in human behavior to consume less and have fewer children.
  • Information and education to date have proven completely ineffective at changing human behavior in a positive direction, and we are out of time to try new methods of education.
  • The advertising industry has developed technologies that are very effective at manipulating people to desire and acquire things they do not need to be happy, and in many cases cannot afford.
  • Merz proposes to redeploy these proven marketing technologies to manipulate people to desire happiness associated with lower consumption and fewer children.
Neither Rachel Donald or Joseph Merz appear aware of Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory but I’m thinking that Merz’s proposal might sidestep the fatal flaw in most other overshoot harm reduction proposals that require humans to first acknowledge the reality of their predicament, which appears to be impossible because of MORT.

The beauty of Merz’s plan is that it does not require reality awareness because it will manipulate humans at a subconscious level.

.... Godspeed to Merz and screw the ethics.

P.S. I doubt it is true, but I observe that if you assume the WEF Great Reset has good intentions grounded in overshoot awareness, it is possible they are thinking along the same lines as Merz with their “you will own nothing and be happy” campaign. The WEF campaign does seem rather clumsy compared to say associating happiness with a Corona beer on a high-carbon long distance vacation. I think it is more likely the WEF is trying to prepare citizens for a Minsky moment in which much asset ownership will transfer to the state.


Pay attention to eating regularly...

The first few articles are all big picture pieces on the failing western financial capital neo-colonialist system. The west has lent money at interest to buy commodities from the world, where commodity producers must use the $US and can barely squeak by. All profits go to the banks and higher level manufacturers that use commodities to make things like iPhones and Teslas, which do make profits. The main beneficiaries are the banks/financiers, who make lots of profit for lending money that they create from air (and faith).

This system has been in place since WW-2, and has been sustained by the US military, CIA, $US and before 1971, American gold. America still exports food, but American farmers are still bankrupt and suiciding, like in the rest of the world. Financial colonialism does not spare any commodity producer.

The "Non-Aligned-Movement" sought to break countries free of financial colonialism, but leaders got assassinated and countries got regime-changed. The desire to free countries from foreign extraction of their wealth, using a despotic elite class, is what led to the American Revolution (basically against the British East India Company).

The $US as the only currency to buy oil made American financial institutions rich, and kept wealth flowing to the US government to finance military adventurism to keep the colonies (Hi Libya!) in line. With the US military now losing face globally, and Russia/China starting to look like better guarantors of "protection" there are desperate actions by the "petrobuck empire" to punish challengers. These desperate actions accelerate the demise of the petrobuck-empire.

My back-of-envelope estimate is that the $US needs to lose 75% of its value this decade to pay off huge financial debts while the economy declines, and dollars come back to the US for wheat, soybeans, oil, and maybe some jet planes. 

This will be very hard on people living in the US. The top 5% will lose the most, because they have wealth to lose. Many cities and states will go bankrupt.


Climate Fare:

Under the Sea, a Hidden Climate Variable: Thawing Permafrost



Related tweet:

GoGreen: Doomsday glacier may soon trigger a dramatic sea-level rise
The ice shelf that kept it in place could fail within 5 years
Thwaites glacier size of Florida holds 2 feet of sea level, is also the “backstop” for 4 other glaciers which holds an additional 10-13 feet of sea level rise

Pettimore: A single Tesla battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. At this rate, over the next thirty years we will need to mine more mineral ores than humans have extracted over the last 70,000 years.

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:

***** Geert Vanden Bossche: Predictions on evolution Covid 19 pandemic

I seriously expect that a series of new highly virulent and highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 (SC-2) variants will now rapidly and independently emerge in highly vaccinated countries all over the world and that they will soon spread at high pace. I expect the current pattern of repetitive infections and relatively mild disease in vaccinees to soon aggravate and be replaced by severe disease and death. Unfortunately, there is no way vaccinees can rely on assistance from their innate immune system to protect against coronaviruses as their relevant innate IgM antibodies are increasingly being outcompeted by infection-enhancing vaccinal Abs, which are continuously recalled due to the circulation of highly infectious Omicron variants. In contrast, Omicron’s high infectiousness would enable the non-vaccinated to train their innate immune defense against SC-2 while the infectious and pathogenic capacity of the new SC-2 variants would be debilitated in the non-vaccinated for lack of infection-enhancing Abs in their blood. Unless...



I've been stunned a few times before. This one takes the cake.



Fact checkers are working overtime to explain away the overwhelming real-world evidence that those vaccinated are more likely to be infected with COVID-19 variants than those unvaccinated.


Raw numbers from the UK

Starting with case rates, this clearly has turned into a pandemic of the vaccinated. Whether or not the unvaccinated are getting more ill or dying more (I’ll discuss this below), infections are clearly being driven by the vaccinated. Boosted over 18s are 3-4 times as likely to be infected than unvaccinated individuals. As I’ve said before, you might have the best vaccine in the world but if you are more likely to get infected and transmit the virus because you’ve had it, it’s not really the best vaccine in the world, is it?

...............................

To conclude, there is no doubt, however you look at it, cases and rates are much higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. If the story ended there then I would still consider this a failure because more cases means more transmission, more hospitalisation and more deaths. Furthermore, more cases means more mutations occurring and in a highly vaccinated population, there will be an evolutionary pressure to mutate so as to be vaccine resistant.

When it comes to hospitalisations and deaths, again, however you look at it, something is wrong with what we are being told about the vaccines. If its high percentages in the boosted then is some kind of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement occurring? If its high percentages in the two dosed then is some king of Original Antigenic Sin occurring or have their immune systems become dysregulated?


Miller: The Remarkably Surprising Results of Ending Mask Mandates

... The “evidence” used by health officials to justify continued mask mandates has consistently been unbelievably flawed and thoroughly debunked.



According to the latest UK Government figures, most triple vaccinated people in England have now lost 80% of their immune system capability compared to the natural immune system capability of unvaccinated people, ... 
But this disaster isn’t only occurring in the UK. Official Government of Canada data shows that on average, triple vaccinated Canadians have now lost 75% of their immune system capability compared to the natural immune system capability of unvaccinated Canadians. ...


Applying the Bradford Hill criteria to assess the possibility that COVID-19 mRNA injections increase COVID-19 itself.

I am grateful to my sister, Dr Jessica Rose, for introducing me to the Bradford Hill criteria. She uses it to assess the potential causal relationship between COVID mRNA injections and adverse events reported in VAERS.

After numerous studies of the relationship between the injections and COVID itself, I think the criteria can also be applied here. I won’t go through them all again but I think there is a compelling case that these criteria are satisfied:
  1. Strength
  2. Consistency
  3. Specificity
  4. Temporality
  5. Biological gradient
  6. Plausibility
  7. Coherence
For reasons that will eventually be clear, I did a quick analysis of Indonesia yesterday evening. Here is a summary of the results that I think support the first 5 criteria. You can judge for yourself. .....

.... The tenth Bradford Hill criteria is “reversibility” (the effect disappears when the cause is removed). You would hope we eventually get to test the final criteria soon but we are so far past any reasonable point by historical standards, it’s difficult to accept that there is any stopping condition at all.



The interview might be one of the best interviews I’ve seen in the past two years in terms of being able to discuss somber and depressing data (the “vaccine fatality rate” while staying entirely non-sensationalist, classy, and true to the linguistic standards of mainstream science—amazingly—in a way that makes it hard to deflect.

Spiro Pantazotos, who is a Columbia researcher, was originally very scared of COVID and was going to stay in his house until the vaccines became available. And then he started looking at actual science—the kind of science coming from censored luminaries like John Ioannidis—and he realized that things were, well, a little different from what we were being told.

And then he saw data that demonstrated a consistent correlation between vaccination rates and all-cause mortality during the following month. He didn’t really want to believe that data because it sounded unpleasant and crazy, but he wanted to understand the facts, and so he looked, and to his astonishment, he had to come to the same conclusion. So, while his starting point was the opposite of controversial, after analyzing the data and accounting for different factors, he now believes that the COVID injections are actually killing some of the people who have received it.

Pantazatos has written a paper, and now of course his paper is getting rejected ...


Commentary:


John Ioannidis, a Professor of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health and by courtesy, of Statistics and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, lauded for championing evidence-based medicine, has been harshly criticized over the past two years. Like many highly-credentialed health experts, Ioannidis made some predictions during the pandemic that eventually proved to be incorrect. During a once-in-a-century pandemic replete with unknowns, that's to be expected. But perhaps the greatest reason he has come under fire is for questioning the orthodoxy of strict lockdowns, divisive vaccine mandates, and other restrictive measures to manage the pandemic. Ioannidis is sure to court more controversy with a new commentary published to the European Journal of Clinicial Investigation in which he argues that it's time to declare the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"This does not mean that the problem is inappropriately minimized or forgotten, but that our communities move on with life," he writes. "Pandemic preparedness should be carefully thought and pre-organized, but should not disrupt life." ...





Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Chudov: If I was a regulator, and if a company presented a product that results in a 50:50 proportion of infant births to deaths, I would personally be alarmed.


Dowd: Pharma, the medical establishment, government, corporations through mandates & media/big tech poisoned 66% of the country. Good job guys. 
FUBAR doesn’t even begin to describe this.


Ethical Skeptic: Again we post the alert flag and question:
What is causing these Non-Covid Excess Natural Cause Deaths? We know cancer is in here, EUA Shadow Deaths, and sudden cardiac arrest in 15 - 54 year olds... but what else?
This should be a national priority... and so far... 
🦗🦗🦗


divinebovine: When the ambulance came to revive my wife, the first question was "how long since the shot?"
Everyone knows.

in response to:
Sam: My daughters 22 year old friend passed away this morning…from a heart attack.


Rigger: The governments, the directors of the covid play, have all been following the same baffling script. It has been a “comedy of menace”. And it has been deeply damaging. At least with a shitty meaningless play we can walk out of the theatre and attempt to obliterate the experience with several shots of Tequila. Not so with covid.


The tweet that got Nick Hudson banned. The narrative still can’t tolerate dissent. It’s too feeble.





"Sudden deaths" all over Europe, India and Australia, among other places, with some especially macabre "adverse events" throughout the UK and in Pakistan





In total, there has been 15 withdrawals/retirements during the Miami Open.

Fans were left shocked at the double retirement from two stars in a bizarre day of tennis.


Pushback Fare:

French Lawyer arrested for Treason after helping Reiner Fuellmich prove World Leaders have committed Crimes Against Humanity in the name of Covid-19


Ontario cop charged for posting video praising truckers



COVID Corporatocracy / Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:


Attached is a document that I put together, which consists of portions of several official Pfizer documents, comparing Pfizer’s public disclosures of adverse events to its confidential disclosures to the FDA of adverse events.

... The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate in one place some of Pfizer’s and the FDA’s fraud, both by commission (what Pfizer said publicly) and also, and equally significantly, by omission (what Pfizer did not say publicly that it had a duty to say).

This goes to the lack of informed consent as well.  I can’t help but think that if the public knew before agreeing to be part of an experiment, post market or otherwise, that Pfizer and the FDA knew that there were nearly 1,000 known serious adverse events, most people would never have “agreed” to take the shots.  But they did not see that critical information.



Australia’s march toward medical authoritarianism continues.

Doctors are now being told they could face discipline for saying anything that contradicts “public health messaging,” even if what they are saying is “evidence-based.”

They may even face investigations for “authoring papers” that health authorities do not like.

Unfortunately, I am not exaggerating.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:


All wars are full of lies. Winston Churchill famously said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” .....

The Russian-Ukraine kinetic war and the broader U.S.-Russian economic war are full of more lies than any public events I’ve seen in my lifetime including Vietnam, Watergate and the Iraq War.

That’s how big the lies are.

Here’s the official U.S. narrative as echoed by the mainstream media: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, Putin’s three-day blitzkrieg of Kyiv has failed, Russian forces are bogged down and valiant Ukrainian troops are putting up a powerful defense and regaining lost ground with the help of weapons from NATO.

In this version, President Zelenskyy is the new Churchill rallying patriots against an evil dictator. All of that is either entirely or mostly false.

Here’s the real story: Russia’s invasion is the end result of 14 years of provocation by the West, including repeated declarations that Ukraine will join NATO and a U.S.-backed coup d’état in 2014 that displaced a pro-Russian president.

Russia never planned a blitzkrieg on Kyiv. That’s a Western invention intended to make Putin look like a failure. In fact, Russia is slowly and methodically taking territory in the south and east of Ukraine in order to control the seacoasts, eliminate pro-fascist elements in Mariupol and establish pro-Russian autonomous zones in Donbas. ......



The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.   

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.


Scott Ritter, in part one of a two-part series, lays out international law regarding the crime of aggression and how it relates to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

... Concerns that any attempt to carve a doctrine of pre-emption out of the four corners of international law defined by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter would result in the creation of new rules of international engagement, and that that would result in the breakdown of international order were realized on Feb. 24. That is when Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Article 51 as his authority, ordered what he called a “special military operation” against Ukraine for the ostensible purpose of eliminating neo-Nazi affiliated military formations accused of carrying out acts of genocide against the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass, and for dismantling a Ukrainian military Russia believed served as a de facto proxy of the NATO military alliance.

Putin laid out a detailed case for pre-emption, detailing the threat that NATO’s eastward expansion posed to Russia, as well as Ukraine’s ongoing military operations against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass. “[T]he showdown between Russia and these forces,” Putin said, “cannot be avoided. It is only a matter of time. They are getting ready and waiting for the right moment. Moreover, they went as far as aspire to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not let this happen.” NATO and Ukraine, Putin declared, “did not leave us [Russia] any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today. In these circumstances, we have to take bold and immediate action. The people’s republics of Donbass have asked Russia for help. In this context, in accordance with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with permission of Russia’s Federation Council, and in execution of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, ratified by the Federal Assembly on February 22, I made a decision to carry out a special military operation.”

Putin’s case for invading Ukraine has, not surprisingly, been widely rejected in the West. ...


*** Roberts: Ukraine Update #9

..... The story as presented to the public by the Western media has no relationship to reality. The Ukraine narrative has collapsed as completely as the Covid narrative. There will be no going back to it. The narrative will simply be dropped as the next crisis–inflation perhaps or a newly released pathogen–takes the front page. There was never a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian military focus was on the Donbass region in east and south Ukraine. Inhabited by Russians and part of Russia herself until Soviet leaders transferred it, like Crimea, into Ukraine for their reasons. When the US overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014 and took control over Ukraine, the Crimean and Donbass Russians voted overwhelmingly to be reunited with Russia. The Kremlin accepted Crimea but not Donbass.

This was a strategic blunder demonstrating a lack of awareness on the part of the Russian government. Immediately the neo-Nazi remnants in west Ukraine, whose forebears had fought for Hitler against Russia in WW II, began abusing the Russian population in the Donbass region in the east. The American puppet government in Kiev followed up by banning the use of the Russian language. To protect themselves, the Donbass Russians declared their independence in the form of two republics, the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics. Ukrainian troops and neo-Nazi militias began attacking these “breakaway republics.” They have been shelling with artillery Donbass villages, towns, and cities for 8 years, killing thousands of civilians, and the Ukrainian forces, although twice defeated by hastily assembled forces in the Donbass, managed to gain control over large areas of the breakaway republics.

It was the deployment of a 100,000 or more Ukrainian force on the shrunken borders of Donbass for an invasion to reconquer the territory that provoked the Russian intervention. Washington’s refusal to give the Kremlin a security guarantee was a second reason for the Russian military intervention. Russia told Washington in completely clear language that Russia would not permit Ukraine to be a member of NATO. Nevertheless, Washington persisted in its provocation. Most of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine is focused on clearing Ukrainian and neo-Nazi forces out of Donbass. This is the reason for Putin’s go-slow war that rules out heavy weapons use on civilian areas. The civilians are Russians, and, as Putin said, “we went in to liberate these people, not to kill them.”




On this week's "Scheer Intelligence," nuclear weapons specialist Ted Postol joins Robert Scheer to discuss how the Ukraine crisis could lead the world past the point of no return.



More and more Russians are challenging government claims that the war in Ukraine is going as planned—and some are even doing so on state-controlled media. But, warns military historian Lawrence Freedman in his newsletter Comment is Freed, it would be a mistake to think this dissent emanates mainly from anti-war circles and could therefore push Putin toward an accommodating stance at the negotiating table.

Much of the criticism of Putin’s war effort, Freedman says, is coming from “hawkish nationalists.” And “it is the nationalists who have been energized by Putin’s aggression and will be most distressed should he fail [in his war aims].” These nationalists “want to move beyond the limited operation that Putin claimed to have set in motion to something more absolutist. Ukraine must be defeated, and seen to be defeated, no matter what the costs. Perhaps because he is aware of this, Putin shows no sign of relenting on any of his core demands.” ....


Russia has abandoned its failed, non-military Plan A for a by-the-books Plan B




Scott Ritter, in the second and final part of this series, lays out what the law says about war crimes and how it applies to the conflict in Ukraine.

..... Starting from the proposition that war is little more than organized murder, the issue of how to define what constitutes murder sufficient to be categorized a being of a criminal nature is far more difficult that one might think. Michael Herr gave voice to this reality in his book, Dispatches, about America’s war in Vietnam, when he observed that, “Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

One of the key considerations that distinguishes a legitimate act of war, and a war crime, is the notion of “military necessity.” According to the precepts set forth in the law of war, military necessity “permits measures which are actually necessary to accomplish a legitimate military purpose and are not otherwise prohibited by international humanitarian law. In the case of an armed conflict the only legitimate military purpose is to weaken the military capacity of the other parties to the conflict.”

.... The final principle of note is that of “distinction”, which holds that parties to an armed conflict must “at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”

... Moreover, it appears that, upon closer examination, the accuser (at least when it comes to the Ukrainian government) might become the accused should any thorough investigation of the alleged events occur. ...


Only available on Russian sites. Wonder if/when this will make it to the English version of TASS. From a translation:
The Kiev leadership informed the British Foreign Office that it did not intend to comply with the Geneva Convention in the treatment of Russian prisoners of war. This is stated in a message released on Friday by the press bureau of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) of the Russian Federation.




Mariupol was battered by Ukraine’s right-wing Azov battalion well before Moscow launched its military ops. In Russian hands, this strategic steelworks port can transform into a hub of Eurasian connectivity.





.... The Russians are running out of time and out of resources to smash the Ukrainian troops west of the Dniepr. It may be that to get the job done, they will finally resort to the “American way of war” and carpet bomb the Ukrainian positions. We will see shortly.

If the Russians succeed in liberating the 50% of Donetsk oblast still held by Kiev, then they will be ready for a cease fire and for definitive peace talks.  By smashing the greatest concentration of Ukrainian forces they will achieve two of their original objectives with one stroke:  de-Nazification and demilitarization.   The question will remain whether Zelenski can sign a peace based on the new realities. It may be in his interest to go to Istanbul for talks with Putin and then to keep on flying to freedom.  His associates in Kiev will surely be ready to lynch him for a bad peace.


"Winning Ukraine" is Actually Losing

The erection of a parallel reality buttressed by a constant flow of propaganda and disinformation, compounded by a circular set of talking heads, magnified by wishful thinking, tells us that Ukraine is winning its war against Russia.

Actual reality is a different matter altogether. Shorn of its south, denied resupply of necessary resources to continue fighting, immobilized in many places, the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) are hunkered down in the very strong defensive positions that they had eight years to build and fortify, but which are now suffering the effects of attrition.

This is politics by warfare: Russia can now clearly be shown to want a negotiated deal with the West over Ukraine, even if the USA and UK want to bleed it to death. Otherwise, the Russians would have simply ‘shocked and awed’ Ukraine. Russia is creating facts on the ground to present Ukraine and the West a fait accompli, despite western propaganda to the contrary.


... Q: You condemn the Russian intervention…

A: My opposition to this war, to all wars, must not become a kind of mantra, a certificate of good citizenship for intellectuals in need of publicity, who all seek the anointing of the moralising doxa. In repeating common places, we contribute absolutely nothing and, on the contrary, entrench a Manichean vision that prevents any debate and understanding of this tragedy. We can denounce Vladimir Putin’s decision, spit on Russia, but it will not solve anything, it will not help Ukrainians.

To be able to put a stop to this war, we must understand the background that has made it possible. The war in Donbass has been going on for eight years and has left 13,000 dead, and has left as many injured, including children. I regret the political and media silence that surrounds it, the indifference to the dead when they are Russian-speaking. To say that does not mean justifying Vladimir Putin’s policy. Just as questioning the warmongering role of the United States, present at all levels of Ukrainian governance both before and during the “Maidan Revolution,” does not amount to clearing Putin of his share of responsibility. Finally, we must keep in mind the precedent set by the bombing of Belgrade and the destruction of Serbia by NATO in 1999 without obtaining the approval of the United Nations Security Council

... When Vladimir Putin says that Russia is threatened, it is not a “pretext”

... Again, I do not legitimize this war in any way, but the important thing is not what I think, nor what we think. In Europe, we are all against this war. But we must understand what Putin thinks, and especially what the Russians, or at least a large part of them, think.

........... To stop hostilities, to give Ukraine a future, we always think that we must move forward; sometimes we must, on the contrary, go back. It must be said: “we were wrong.” In 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had come to a fork in the road. We took the wrong way. I really thought then that there would be no more obstacles, that NATO would be dissolved because America no longer had an enemy, that we would form a great peaceful continent.

...... A few years ago, I met Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, who shared this vision of a Europe from Paris to Saint Petersburg. But the Americans decided otherwise. This would have meant the end of NATO, the end of the militarization of Europe. A Europe supported by Russia and its wealth would have become too powerful and independent. Nevertheless, I hope that a new president will take over this idea. Europe is a sinking Titanic and from one crisis to another, we are fighting for survival.



Recent emails unearthed by the U.K. Daily Mail and the National Pulse reveal that during the last decade, Hunter Biden seemed to have a keen interest in pathogen research in Ukraine and using it as a tool for geopolitical affairs in that country. It just so happens to be that a pathogen connected to gain-of-function research destroyed the world, and then the next “big current thing” on the geopolitical stage was none other than Ukraine. Shouldn’t the American people get some answers as to why our government was so heavily involved – via the vice president’s son – in both pathogen research and Ukraine and to make sure Ukraine is not Wuhan 2.0?



The timing of the early March 2022 release of this digital streaming documentary could not be more auspicious.  For anyone wanting to understand how we arrived at a new Cold War with the second Irish-Catholic Democratic president in U.S. history, Joseph Biden, spewing belligerent absurdities about Ukraine, Russia, and Vladimir Putin, and leading a charge toward a World War III that could easily turn nuclear, the aggregated factual details in this series of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and its minions is essential history that illuminates current events. 

While Kennedy was the last U.S. president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness  that the promotion of war and the military industrial complex were at the top of their job description.  They have gladly served the god of war and ravaged countries around the world with the glee of sadists and madmen.  Pusillanimous in the extreme, they have sought the presidency knowing they would never oppose the gunmen in the shadows who demanded their obedience.  They heard the message from the streets of Dallas loud and clear and followed orders as required....


ha... Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova fighting Western hypocrisy with a bit of truth-telling:



Tweet Thread:

Ritter: 1/ Big Arrow War—a primer. For all those scratching their heads in confusion, or dusting off their dress uniforms for the Ukrainian victory parade in Kiev, over the news about Russia’s “strategic shift”, you might want to re-familiarize yourself with basic military concepts.
.....
16/ This is Big Arrow War at its finest, something Americans used to know but forgot in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq. It also explains how 200,000 Russians have been able to defeat 600,000 Ukrainians. Thus ends the primer on maneuver warfare, Russian style.



Vid Fare:


Since the onset of the Great Censorship that Western governments and major media companies put in place in February, all of Cross Talk programs are no longer carried by youtube.com  which is where most of their audience was concentrated.  Live reception of RT is, of course, impossible in Europe and North America due to the prohibition on this channel.  In the meantime, RT production people are preparing to place the shows on a new internationally accessible platform.

 Paul Lookman has done us all a great service by finding the key to the door, and posting the show:

With mainstream media being overly deferential to political and economic power, governments manipulating public opinion, thinktanks and public relations “experts” dominating media output, and preciously few academics acting as sources of relatively independent comment and analysis, consumers of news need to explore alternative news and information sites. It is in this category that ‘Geopolitiek in context’ tries to do its bit.



Orwellian Fare:




Warm up the Wagnerian orchestra and call in the goose-stepping chorus girls, because … yes, that’s right, it’s Springtime for GloboCap! “The Winter of Severe Illness and Death” is over! The big Black Sun is shining again! God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world!

OK, sure, the vast majority of humanity are suffering from post-traumatic stress, having been terrorized, gaslighted, threatened, bullied, and otherwise systematically mindfucked by their governments, the media, and “health authorities” on a daily basis for the past two years, and we’re all exhausted and at each other’s throats, and many of our businesses and incomes have been ruined, and inflation is spiraling out of control, and a lot of us are still being gratuitously demonized, segregated from society, banned from traveling, and forced to submit to invasive procedures and wear medically-pointless symbols of ideological conformity on our faces, so we’re not quite in the spirit of the season … but, for GloboCap, things couldn’t be going any better!

Not only is the final phase of their roll-out of the new pathologized totalitarianism (i.e., the New Normal) going more or less to plan, but those pesky, non-ball-playing Russians have been baited into a military quagmire in the Ukraine that could be dragged out for years! Think of all the destabilization, restructuring, and privatization opportunities, and not just in Russia and Eastern Europe, and not just during the next few years, but throughout the world and well into the future! With the majority of the Western masses brain-buggered into a state of almost catatonic credulity and obedience, who’s going to stop them? The sky’s the limit!

We’re talking radical social and economic restructuring, a brave new GloboCap-curated world! A world of constant chaos and crisis, eternally recurring “apocalyptic pandemics,” intramural proxy wars, climate-change lockdowns, “disinformation” attacks, mandatory genetic-therapy, digital currencies … the whole nine yards.....

.... In the blink of an eye, without missing a beat, both the white-supremacist Putin-Nazis that plagued Democracy throughout the Trumpian Reich and the Covid-denying Anti-Vax Nazis that plagued the New Normals throughout the Global Pandemic were seamlessly replaced by the GloboCap Nazis … but, the thing is, the GloboCap Nazis are the good guys, and the Putin-Nazis and Anti-Vax Nazis are … well, I guess they’re still technically Nazis, except for the fact that they aren’t actual Nazis and are mostly just regular working-class people, whereas the GloboCap Nazis are actual Nazis (i.e., Sieg-heiling, Jew-hating, Hitler-worshiping Nazis), who the US military and Intelligence community, NATO, and assorted private “military advisors” have been funding, arming, and otherwise supporting since the 2014 Ukrainian “revolution” (i.e., coup) that they orchestrated to destabilize Russia as part of that global Clear-and-Hold operation (which operation, of course, doesn’t actually exist, and is just another conspiracy theory disseminated by Putin-Nazi traitors like me to erode support for the GloboCap Nazis. ...

OK, I know this is getting confusing, what with all the various Nazis, and so on, but that’s only because you’re still trying to make sense of the psychotic official propaganda that GloboCap is relentlessly bombarding us with. .....


i really don't know one way or another, but, fwiw
Reality Show Politics Episode 3

..... This program was brought to you by the world's greatest product pfakers. 



CaitOz Fare:


If, hypothetically speaking, the US wanted to rule the world, it likely would have begun planning years ago to subvert the rise of China. Step One would have involved a plan to cripple the powers who support it, like Russia. They’d have begun propagandizing us for this years ago. Hypothetically speaking.

It’s a good thing this is a hypothetical scenario and the US has no plans of global domination, because otherwise by now we’d probably have been marinating in a virulent anti-Russia propaganda campaign for five or six years and would be brainwashed into cheerleading for Russia to be choked off from the global economy with the goal of toppling Moscow.

This hypothetical scenario could never happen in real life, because such a propaganda campaign would require western intelligence agencies to plant stories demonizing Russia in the western press for years, and our free press would never uncritically publish claims by spy agencies. That would be flat-out propaganda. The free press are full of hard-nosed muckraking journalists who shine the bold light of truth on government agencies to hold the powerful to account. They’d never act as willing proxies for government agencies working to manufacture consent for unipolarist geostrategic agendas.

And it’s a good thing, too. Can you imagine if the US and its allies and the entire western press were working together, wittingly or unwittingly, toward toppling powerful nuclear-armed nations in the way the USSR was toppled? Things would be getting very crazy and confrontational by now.

Thank God we live in a free society where government agencies are transparent and accountable, where military geostrategic objectives are rigorously checked by democratically elected officials, and journalists never face any consequences for telling the truth about these things.

Because we might be staring down the barrel of nuclear armageddon just to fulfill the unipolarist fantasies of a few powerful psychopaths if the situation I just laid out were anything but purely hypothetical. ...

❖

Still blows my mind that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and escalating cold war tensions with Moscow which helped lead us to where we’re at now, and yet liberals spent that whole time calling him a Putin puppet.

❖

The warning signs that our competition-based systems are unsustainable will get less and less subtle until we either move to collaboration-based systems or receive our final warning in the form of climate collapse or nuclear armageddon.



The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies, was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies.



.... Ahead of a meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has made some comments which clearly illustrate the US-centralized empire’s actual problem with Moscow.

“We, together with you, and with our sympathisers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order,” Lavrov said to the Chinese government on Wednesday.

And that right there ladies and gentlemen is the real reason we’ve been hearing so much hysterical shrieking about Russia these last five or six years. It’s never been about Russian hackers. Nor about a Kremlin pee pee tape. Nor about Trump Tower. Nor about GRU bounties in Afghanistan. Nor about Manafort, Flynn, Bannon, Papadopoulos or any other Russiagate Surname of the Week. It’s not even actually about Ukraine. Those have all been narrative-shaping constructs manipulated by the US intelligence cartel to manufacture support for a final showdown against Russia and China to prevent the emergence of a multipolar world.

The US government has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any powers which could challenge its imperial agendas for the world. ...

... Basically all we’re looking at in the major international news stories of our time is the rise of a multipolar world crashing headlong into an empire which has espoused the belief that unipolar domination must be retained at all cost, even if it means flirting with the possibility of a very fast and radioactive third world war.

... If you think things are crazy now, just you wait until the imperial crosshairs move to Beijing.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Moglia: Making sense of Western media is like fitting wheels to a tomato – time consuming and completely unnecessary. Ever since the media became an instrument of persuasion, the greatest part of mankind have no other reason for their opinion than they are in fashion. In turn, fashion is independent of reason and reason requires thought.


Ehret: While navigating through today’s propaganda-heavy world of misinformation, spin and outright creative writing which appears to have replaced conventional journalism, it is most important that two qualities are active in the mind of any truth-seeker. The first quality is the adherence to a strong top down perspective, both historic and global. This is vital in order to guide us as a sort of compass or North Star used by sailors navigating across the ocean. The second quality is a strong power of logic, memory and discernment of wheat vs. chaff to process the mountains of data that slap us in the face from all directions like sand in a desert storm.


Roberts: Just as everything you were told about Covid by the media and health and government officials was false, so is everything you have been told by the same propagandistic liars about Ukraine. Americans have had nothing but lies since the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, of his brother, US Senator Robert Kennedy President-in-Waiting, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam war, 9/11, Saddam Hussian’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction,” Assad’s “use of chemical weapons,” Iranian nukes, the extraordinary lies about Kaddafi, Covid pandemic, Russian invasions. The entire Western World lives in The Mattrix, a world created by propaganda. The vast majority of people in the West have no idea of the reality in which they live.


Kunstler: The Russian clean-up of Ukraine has exposed the operational base of the Biden Family’s flagrant crimes. The laptop confirms that Hunter’s Rosemont Seneca front company invested in the chain of bio-weapons labs set up by the CIA and Department of Defense and operated through their front company Metabiota, with tendrils reaching to the Wuhan, China, virology lab that was the most likely point-of-origin for SARS-CoV-2, a.k.a. Covid-19. Money money money everywhere along the trail for the Biden Family, fees-for-service from the crooked Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, chairman of Burisma, the gas company that provided walking-around money for Hunter’s insatiable drug habit and degenerate sexual adventures… more millions from shady sources in Russia… and then billions more from the board rooms of Chinese companies connected with the intel and military arms of the CCP.


Martyanov: Evidently in the course of what passes in the West for statesmanship, throwing hollow promises to the left and to the right is considered a pinnacle of statecraft, while elsewhere it is considered to be mere bullshit. Germany, evidently, decided that making grandiose statements without any wherewithal to support them in practice is a good policy. 


Makine: I pity the Ukrainians who are dying under the bombs, as well as the young Russian soldiers engaged in this fratricidal war. The fate of the suffering people matters more to me than that of the elites. As Paul Valéry said, “war is waged by men who do not know each other and who massacre each other for the sake of men who know each other and do not massacre each other.”


Doctorow: my good friend Ray McGovern.. asked for my thoughts on a recent interview given by MIT professor emeritus Ted Postol. Postol was lambasting the young “punks” who seem to populate the ranks of advisers to Joe Biden.  What Postol missed is that exactly kids like these were always doing the grunt work in political science.  Lots of creativity, zero competence. They were surely the kind of folks who said in 2008 to let Lehman go under, because it would have a salutary effect on risk-taking by speculators. They were ignorant of the disasters that lay ahead then, just as those formulating the sanctions policy against Russia today are ignorant of the blowback to come. Of course, no nation has a monopoly on stupidity and ignorance of economics.


Brownstein: We have been taught to trust our feelings. Being authentic, we are told, is the key to success. On college campuses, feelings have been elevated to the sacred. Gillian McCann, a professor of religion at Canada’s Nipissing University, relates the story of her graduate school supervisor advising her “to do whatever [she] felt.” A friend listening to her story quipped, “That kind of advice has ruined a generation.”


Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Max Planck)
.... In terms of complexity, the collective is a nonlinear function of the size. A one-body problem is easy to handle. A two-body is more complicated, but in most cases tractable. Three-body is very difficult, while the few-body problem is impossible. However, an infinite-body problem is easy. Loss of granularity washes away as the number of degrees of freedom increases. The wave equation describing a vibrating string is significantly simpler than the Schrödinger equation for a single atom; their discoveries are separated by two centuries.

Collective IQ < Average IQ

When it comes to intelligence, a similar pattern unfolds — size is its enemy. As the group grows, at some point, it inevitably begins to get stupider. It is not difficult to fool a single person. All you need is some persuasive skills and a little intelligence. Fooling two people can be complicated – they can compare their thoughts and come up with non-overlapping objections and increase resistance to persuasion by filtering out the nonsense more effectively. Fooling a few, say five, people is practically impossible, even if they are of average intelligence. They retain their individuality (and independent thinking) while their cooperation still remains strong. Manipulating large masses, however, can be very easy (as witnessed by numerous historical examples and confirmed by the experience of the last five years). Large groups would believe what even its stupidest members would reject on their own.

As the group grows beyond a certain size, the task of deceiving them becomes progressively easier. Individual wisdom and constructive cooperation changes and gives way to collective thinking where individuality is lost. In large groups, the collective IQ resides significantly below the average IQ – no matter how intelligent individuals are, their collective intelligence will be low. Although this inequality is an empirical observation, it is never violated in practice. 

....

The intelligence problem and the power of 16-percenters
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. (George Carlin)
Things don’t look encouraging when observed at higher resolution. This is a graph of the IQ distribution. The average IQ is around 100 with 68% of population residing inside the two standard deviations range, between 85 and 115, which means that about 16% are of deep sub-average intelligence. These numbers are fairly robust across different countries in the developed world.

This distribution becomes particularly alarming when applied to a large relatively non-oppressive country. In the context of modern liberal societies, the synergy of stupidity, size, and democracy reinforces the malignant potential of the stupidity of the collective. 

....

Humanity cannot outgrow its own death drive
Intelligence is not a theoretical quantity, but represents a behavioral quality of creatures in an open environment. (Peter Sloterdijk)
Humans are generally intelligent, but this individual intelligence fails to get collectivized. This has only become worse with progress and the general trend of increasing acceleration and addiction to speed. The long term has become so long that it now exceeds our capacity for statistical prediction, but the short-term has accelerated so much that snap decisions are the only decisions ever made. The stakes have become higher – short-term survival is no longer guaranteed, which leads to a shift of focus.

...

At the core of the incoherent response to the pandemic – the spectacular failure of adjusting to the most straightforward problem of self-defense of the collective body – resides collective abdication of responsibility. This was a simple test of common sense, accepting the most basic measures any single human would normally have no problems accepting, but which collectively encountered resistance on a large scale (bordering on hysterical) causing, at the end, massive casualties, financial and economic damages, and unnecessary complications and extension of the pandemic. The resistance to alignment with simple and logical adjustment to an existential threat is just another illustration of the erosion of basic survival instincts caused by decades of deliberate and programmatic anti-science project and glorification of mediocrity.

In the world of infinite acceleration, humanity is spontaneously converging towards a state of maximum cognitive incompetence, a collective Dunning-Kruger effect. 

.....

Instead of regulating human nature, capitalism as well as both communism and fascism only continue to reaffirm, time and again, what humans are truly capable of and enabled the full realization of that potential. And we haven’t seen the last of it, not yet. Free or oppressed, unable to avoid the degradation of collective intellect and preserve the wisdom of the few, humanity will always find ways to hurt itself. 

...

The self-imposed ignorance and collective myopia have reached the point where the West has elevated its own annihilation to a supreme aesthetic act. Against that backdrop Asbest is our future has acquired a universal metaphoric ring as a mantra of the directionless escape of mankind where the endgame appears unavoidable — a slow death in a hyperoptimized dystopian trap. This is the realization of Arthur Schnitzler’s vision of the human race as an illness of some higher organism, within which it has found a purpose and meaning, but which it also sought to destroy, in the same way virus strives to annihilate the ailing human organism and in that process destroys itself.


Politics and "public spaces" as cargo cults for meaning

.... The author pretty much blames neoliberalism as practiced by Reagan and Thatcher for what has gone wrong. Roberts, in contrast, doesn’t believe there is much of a connection between what economic system we live under and how connected people feel towards one another.

...... I haven’t researched the question of whether people are actually lonelier than before in any depth, but the argument sounds plausible to me so I’ll grant that they are. Yet even if I do, the supposed answer to the problem presented here strikes me as absurd. ... Blood relations, and the pair bonds that help create them, are not one form of social connectedness we can just exchange for something else once we don’t want to bother with the hassle of getting married and making babies anymore. Procreation and family formation are the evolutionary reasons love exists in the first place, and there is little to suggest that we can replace these things through government sponsored initiatives that seek to connect us to those we are not either having sex with or related to.

..... Marxists could at least promise a kind of utopia. Wokeness today has most of the energy on the left, but I gather that people of a more centrist disposition – that is, those who do things like write books on loneliness – understand that it’s too inherently divisive to ever be the answer to modern meaninglessness. So what’s left? Fund the library! Really, if you’re talking about the library as the path out of nihilism, you’re out of ideas.

... There’s no way out of this paradox. The woke-skeptical left wants people to have meaning in life, but is uncomfortable with the things that actually give them meaning.  ..



... It seems to me that humans have generally trusted higher status people more, and that we still do so today. For example, status is the main way we trust doctors, lawyers, CEOs, fund managers, and many other professionals (instead of track records or incentive contracts).

.... I think we are suffering enormous losses from trusting based on status, instead of using other methods. But it seems very hard to displace our innate trust of the high status enough to get people to consider such alternatives. We don’t seek solutions when we don’t think we have a problem.



The power of language is magical to behold. Through the mere pronouncement of words, people can be persuaded to do what they would never have thought to do, left to their own devices. The playbook with the most success in this regard is that of war. When people are “informed” that they and their families are in mortal danger, they can and often will acquiesce to any and all policies which government authorities claim to be necessary in order to protect them.

Young people can be coaxed into killing complete strangers who never did anything personally to them. Citizens can be brainwashed to believe that suitably labeled persons can and indeed must be denied any and all human rights. When the stakes are claimed to be life and death, even apparently intelligent people can be goaded to accept that the mere possession of a divergent opinion is evil, and the expression of dissent a crime. The use of military weapons to execute obviously innocent, entirely innocuous civilians, including children, suddenly becomes permissible, so long as the victims have been labeled collateral damage. All any of this takes is to identify “the enemy” as evil.

.........

The slaughtered “soldiers” were assumed to be guilty of possible complicity in future possible crimes, a preposterous position never fully grasped by Obama’s devotees, who somehow failed to recognize that the specific implement used to kill does not distinguish various types of homicide from one another, morally speaking. The extrajudicial execution of individual human beings in civil society is illegal, but the Obama administration effectively maintained that the targeting of suspicious persons and their associates in lands far away was perfectly permissible, so long as the victims were killed by missiles launched from drones, thereby rendering them “acts of war.”

... Blinded to the moral atrocity of this new lethal-centric approach to dealing with suspected enemies, whereby they would be executed rather than taken prisoner, Obama’s loyal supporters blithely embraced the propaganda according to which he was a smart warrior. After demonstrating his death creds to the satisfaction of hawks, by killing not only Osama bin Laden, but also U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, suspected of complicity in factional terrorism, Obama was reelected for a second term in 2012, despite having summarily executed thousands of men—mostly brown-skinned, unnamed, and unarmed—located in their own civil societies, far from any U.S. citizen, and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.

.........

Improbably enough, the very same two words, imminent and immediate, used by the Obama legal team to invert the presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt in the case of terrorist suspects located abroad, proved to be deadly in an entirely different context during the twenty-first century as well.

... In its quest to sell as many pills as possible, the pharmaceutical industry repeatedly pivoted to neologize in lethal ways over the two decades following the launch of Oxycontin in 1996. 

... Pharma-coopted lawmakers were notified of the proliferating addiction problem early on but refused to stop the runaway train by demanding that the FDA cease playing along with Purdue’s insane pro-narcotics marketing campaign

... As the opioid crisis began to become recognized for what it was, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sought to issue “Immediate Suspension Orders” (ISOs) against the three major drug wholesale distributors to pharmacies, Cardinal Health, McKesson, and Amerisource Bergen. Through issuing such orders, Joe Rannazzisi, the deputy director of the Office of Diversion Control, hoped to halt the ongoing mass shipments of opioids to retailers such as CVS in cases where the sheer volume of prescriptions could not be explained by ordinary medical practice and so was a clear indication that widespread diversion of narcotics was underway.

Rannazzisi ended up being hobbled by a team of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who managed to cobble together a new law in 2014 which, despite its beneficent-sounding name, “The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act” (HR4709), served to protect, above all, drug manufacturers and distributors.

... President Obama signed the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2014 into law, and the marketing campaign used to promote the use of highly addictive time-release narcotics barreled ahead. The DEA’s sudden inability to call a halt to the shipment of tons of narcotics to retailers effectively guaranteed that the number of dependent persons would multiply, as potent prescription pills continued to be diverted for recreational uses and thereby create more addicts. But more addicts meant more overdoses, not only from the potent pills themselves, but also because the street supplies of heroin to which many users eventually turned were often cut with extremely dangerous fentanyl.

...... By pushing through his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, which leftists were led to believe would create a system of socialized medicine (referred to by many as Obamacare), the president notoriously bowed to drug makers and the insurance industry, extending to those sectors the very form of crony corporate welfare already enjoyed by companies in the military industry.

Obama’s collaboration with pharmaceutical and insurance company executives in crafting the ACA allowed them to secure advantageous pricing arrangements to ensure the maximization of their profits, while at the same time massively increasing the sheer volume of sales. 

... Obamacare ultimately made medical treatment in the United States prohibitively expensive for many middle class families, whose copays, premiums and deductibles increased dramatically. The new mandatory healthcare program skyrocketed the salaries of health industry executives while pricing drugs and procedures out of reach for many persons who had previously been able to afford them. 

...... In a representative democracy, the lawmakers promote the interests of the voters who elected them. What kind of government sacrifices the lives of human beings in order to maximize the profits of corporate leaders?


How computer programmer Curtis Yarvin became America’s most controversial political theorist

...... Like Niccolò Machiavelli, to whom he is sometimes compared, Yarvin defines himself as an amoral realist who invented a new theory of government that upends established doctrines of political morality. Starting in the late 2000s, his name—not his real name, he was still known then by his blogging pseudonym—began to be whispered among some of the most powerful people in the country, a secret society made up of disaffected members of the American elite.

Shortly after Donald Trump entered the White House, reports started to circulate that Yarvin was secretly advising Trump strategist Steve Bannon. His writing, according to one article, had established the “theoretical groundwork for Trumpism.”

Yarvin denied the rumors, sometimes playfully and at other times strenuously. But he was consistent in his criticisms of the Trumpian approach to politics. Mass populist rallies and red MAGA hats struck him as merely a weak imitation of democratic energies that had already died out. “Trump is a throwback from the past, not an omen of the future,” he wrote in 2016. “The future is grey anonymous bureaucrats, more Brezhnev every year.”

What Yarvin is, if one wants to be accurate, is the founder of neoreaction, an ideological school that emerged on the internet in the late 2000s marrying the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society. Against democracy. Against equality. Against the liberal faith in an arc of history that bends toward justice.

... In Yarvin’s worldview, what keeps American democracy running today is not elections but illusions projected by a set of institutions, including the press and universities, that work in tandem with the federal bureaucracy in a complex he calls the Cathedral. “The mystery of the Cathedral,” Yarvin writes, “is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.”

Living Americans might be able to glean a sense of the phenomenon Yarvin describes in the current public discourse. It has often seemed in recent years that every few weeks has brought a new instance in which journalists and experts instantaneously, almost magically converged on shared talking points related to the hysteria du jour—cycling through moral crusades to free children from cages at the U.S. border, save the post office from a fascist coup, label the filibuster a tool of white supremacy, and so on. The power of the Cathedral is that it cannot be seen because it is located everywhere and nowhere, baked into the architecture of how we live, communicate, and think.

... If democracy is so decrepit and ineffective, one might ask how it is that America became the world’s great superpower and maintained that position for the last century. Yarvin’s answer contains two parts: first, that nothing lasts forever. Second, while American supremacy may once have rested on innovation and growth, the country, now a bloated empire, has been surviving for decades on the power of myth-making and mass illusions.

Whether or not he can be compared to Machiavelli the man, it is correct to describe Yarvin as a Machiavellian, in the meaning given to that term by the American political writer James Burnham, a one-time follower of Leon Trotsky who later became a committed anti-communist. Like the historical figures chronicled in Burnham’s book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, Yarvin believes that one of the worst aspects of democracy is the fact that it rarely exists. Because democracy is the rule of the many, and the rule of the many is inherently unstable, democracies rarely last long.

Burnham argues that all complex societies are in effect oligarchies ruled by a small number of elites. To hide this fact and legitimize their rule in the eyes of the masses, oligarchies employ the powers of mystification and propaganda. Indeed, Yarvin believes that America stopped being a democracy sometime after the end of World War II and became instead a “bureaucratic oligarchy”—meaning that political power is concentrated within a small group of people who are selected not on the basis of hereditary title or pure merit but through their entry into the bureaucratic organs of the state. What remains of American democracy is pageantry and symbolism, which has about as much connection to the real thing as the city of Orlando has to Disney World.

In place of a functional democratic system, Yarvin came to believe, there now exists an industrial-scale symbolic apparatus that generates the illusion of political agency necessary for society’s real rulers to carry out their business undisturbed. American voters still go to the polls to pick their leader, but the president is a ceremonial figure beholden to the permanent bureaucracy.



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