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Tuesday, May 10, 2022

2022-05-10

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

Economic and Market Fare:

James K. Galbraith: The Dollar System in a Multi-Polar World


Wolfgang Streeck: Return of the King

If there ever was a question of who is boss in Europe, NATO or the European Union, the war in Ukraine has settled it, at least for the foreseeable future. ...









Wall Street titan Jeremy Grantham has been warning of a “superbubble” in the U.S. since last year, arguing the S&P 500 is set to be cut in half as an era marked by exceedingly risky investor behavior begins to fade.

Now, the cofounder and chief investment strategist of the Boston-based asset management firm Grantham, Mayo, and van Otterloo (GMO) is warning the U.S. may be headed toward a housing crisis as mortgage rates soar, and the effects on the economy could be devastating.



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

“Elephant in the room”: Clean energy’s need for unsustainable minerals





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

U.S. police trainers with far-right ties are teaching hundreds of cops


Maajid Nawaz: The Covid Vaccine Boomerang

It’s been a bad week for Big Pharma, and it will continue to get worse for them, and by consequence, for us.

One by one, large pharmaceutical giants are being exposed as money-grabbing corporate beasts who view us - the people - as lab-rats rather than patients. 

... Not to be outdone, all the large pharmaceutical companies behind the Covid jab are now meeting their comeuppance as a public reckoning begins to hit home and will only increase in intensity as people slowly begin to awaken from their stupor. ...



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

******* The collapse of the global food supply begins

... The other thing to keep in mind, is that the damages from warming increase at superlinear speed. The first 0.5 degree of global warming didn’t cause us much trouble. In fact, they seem to have improved global agricultural production. In recent years, it’s becoming clear that 1 degree of warming is now starting to cause us trouble. And yet, we will face another 0.5 degrees of warming, which will cause worse damage. We’re likely to see another 0.5 degree after that, which will again cause more severe damage to be piled on top of the damage caused by the previous 0.5 degree.

You’re now just seeing the start of the catastrophe we’re going to face, it’s merely going to get worse in the years ahead, regardless of what we do. If we somehow miraculously stopped all of our emissions today, there would still be additional warming. In practice however, stopping emissions overnight is impossible.

See, this is ultimately the problem we’re dealing with: Human beings seem to have assumed that global warming is nasty for the polar bears who die of starvation in the arctic, that this is why we have to reduce emissions, or that some obscure islands in the pacific ocean are going to disappear.

And the reason they’re bringing it like this is because nobody really likes to hear the message of: “Hey your children are going to die of hunger if we don’t fix this.” Governments don’t particularly like it either, because it stops people from reproducing. But as you can now hopefully see, that’s the direction this is going.

It was never about the polar bears, or the penguins, or the obscure pacific island that will drown. It was about whether civilization was going to collapse this century and billions of people would die or not.

..... Even when people acknowledge this problem is real, it’s always just some intellectual abstraction to them, some vague problem we have to solve in the future, but it’s not something that has real world consequences to them, now that we’re failing to solve it. Human psychology just doesn’t seem to allow for that.


Related Tweets:

Just Collapse: Global industrial civilisation cannot be decoupled from #overshoot and fossil fuels. We are fossil fueled overshooters. 
We collapse if we continue in overshoot. We collapse if we don't.
We collapse if we continue to use fossil fuels. We collapse if we don't. 
CATCH 22.



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:

eugyppius: The Booster Campaign Has Been A Stupid Thing

Even according to official statistics, booster doses provide only transient protection against symptomatic infection and severe outcomes, which rapidly fades towards the same baseline as the first two vaccine doses. In low-risk demographics, booster doses are stupid; they entail substantial risk and they don’t reduce SARS-2 transmission. In at-risk demographics, boosters are also stupid, unless they’re offered in the fall to the highest-risk groups. Otherwise, you end up exchanging an unknown number of adverse reactions for very little prospect of reducing hospitalisations or mortality, since the latter are concentrated in winter infections.

These points have become clearer and clearer, as the Robert Koch Institut has continued to track booster performance against Omicron through the spring. ...


Vaccine Safety Myth - Occasionally vaccines can damage endothelial blood-to-tissue barriers leading to pregnancy dramas and to infertility


Commentary:


We had an inexpensive life-saving solution both before and during the pandemic… The inconvenient truth is that even at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a very simple, inexpensive and effective treatment was available that could have saved the majority of lives lost. All that the WHO and public health bureaucracy had to do was to recommend and support people taking sufficient Vitamin D3. This failure to act traces back to the unscientific bias and pro-vaccine obsession of Dr. Anthony Fauci. And once again the legacy media, while being paid by the US government and the pharmaceutical industry to promote vaccination, acted by censoring, defaming and suppressing the ability of physicians to inform people of scientific truth. The disease you suffered, the loss of life among your family and friends, could have been greatly reduced by simply getting enough Vitamin D3.



..... So why did it happen?  We don't know.  But what that proves is that we don't actually understand what we're doing, don't have a boundary on the risks -- and any claim we do is a lie.

Now we have a new potential issue showing up with severe hepatitis in young people which has no reasonable link to covid vaccines, since in nearly all people of that age they're not eligible to receive them.  But, ominously, it is linked to an adenovirus that, in the past, has no known causation for hepatitis.

This raises a question: Has co-infection with another adenovirus, along with the vector being introduced to an unwitting person either in the form of the J&J or AstraZeneca vaccines, resulted in reassortment in the body and a transmissible adenovirus that causes liver damage?

It's possible -- but likely very hard to prove, perhaps impossibly-so, that we caused this.  I'll note that widespread use of adenovirus-vector jabs has not been done at scale before -- they've been tested and are in trials, but widespread deployment had never occurred before Covid. 

Now it has.

Coincidences do occur folks, and correlation doesn't equate to causation.  But when you genetically abuse something, deliberately deploy it on a widespread basis across millions of people and then another very serious malady shows up with a link to the family of viruses you abused that has never been seen in that family of viruses before if that doesn't raise your eyebrows you're not very bright. ...


A 22X increase in athlete deaths that nobody can explain, 75% of UCSF/Marin radiology department says "no way" to the booster, and world governments no longer break out stats for vaxxed vs. unvaxxed.


Pfizer tested their COVID vaccine on rats and then let pregnant women take it

You probably didn’t know that Pfizer dumped 80,000 pages of documents this week.

That’s because the American corporate media refused to cover it — and that’s because almost all of them took money from the Biden regime to promote the experimental vaccines and kill any critical coverage of them.

Anyway, it turns out that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was not 95% effective: the data shows it has a 12% efficacy rate. ...


Laurie Garrett gives us the real rationale for mask mandates.



The two nicest and smartest mask experts I know are Stephen Petty and Tyson Gabriel.


Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Zola: Naomi Wolf is doing excellent job. Now before some people start to discredit her and her info as disinformation,  let's remember she is just quoting Pfizer's own data


Anecdotal Fare:

Gorilla Martha and Human Kassidi Kurill did NOT have to Die



... This Substack really saddens me. I have these days when doing this really sucks. I hope that this article pays some kind of homage and honor to him, and his family. They need justice.



COVID Corporatocracy Fare:

Big Pharma Is Still Making Absurd Profits Off of the Pandemic



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:


... The most important part of Vladimir Putin's speech to the Victory Parade on the Red Square is the narrative that explains how the current war in Ukraine began. Putin is correct in seeing this as a NATO proxy war against Russia:
[D]espite all controversies in international relations, Russia has always advocated the establishment of an equal and indivisible security system which is critically needed for the entire international community.
Last December we proposed signing a treaty on security guarantees. Russia urged the West to hold an honest dialogue in search for meaningful and compromising solutions, and to take account of each other’s interests. All in vain. NATO countries did not want to heed us, which means they had totally different plans. And we saw it.

Another punitive operation in Donbass, an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea, was openly in the making. Kiev declared that it could attain nuclear weapons. The NATO bloc launched an active military build-up on the territories adjacent to us.

Thus, an absolutely unacceptable threat to us was steadily being created right on our borders. There was every indication that a clash with neo-Nazis and Banderites backed by the United States and their minions was unavoidable.

Let me repeat, we saw the military infrastructure being built up, hundreds of foreign advisors starting work, and regular supplies of cutting-edge weaponry being delivered from NATO countries. The threat grew every day.

Russia launched a pre-emptive strike at the aggression. It was a forced, timely and the only correct decision. A decision by a sovereign, strong and independent country.


Ilargi: Victory Day in the Motherland


Rebranding Nazism

As a teacher of history, the topic of Nazi Germany is always one which generates numerous questions from students. How were the Nazis able to convince the public to vote for them? How did they convince the people to go along with their fascist agenda and barbaric policies? How was the Holocaust allowed to take place? Despite discussing the role of propaganda and censorship, as well as the fear of opposing the Nazi regime, one still finds students often somewhat bemused. Moreover, many invariably argue that nowadays, due to social media, the Internet, and other methods of communication, the evils of Nazism could never succeed in flourishing again.

However, that is about to change. One only has to look at the manner in which the Azov Battalion, a fully-fledged Ukrainian Nazi militia, with significant influence, has been whitewashed in the space of ten weeks. Whereas prior to February 24th 2022, they were recognised as a neo-Nazi battalion, these fascists are now being portrayed as valiant defenders of an oppressed people, fighting bravely against insurmountable odds. In the past, we have become only too well aware of the role played by the media and big tech in propagandising and manufacturing consent. Whether it’s the mainstream media parroting establishment talking points, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube censoring dissenting views, or Paypal denying media outlets access to their own accounts apparently due to their political stances, Western disinformation full-spectrum dominance appears to be at its zenith.


Related Tweets:

Blumenthal: Western media has an unspoken ban on footage of the many Mariupol evacuees who said they were used as human shields, shot at or abused by the Azov Battalion


Orwellian Fare:

“We knew we were protected” -- NATO's terrorist army recruited fascists and targeted ordinary civilians to strike fear into the heart of the populace and abort radical political change.



CaitOz Fare:


As we hydroplane toward the brink of nuclear armageddon while Bono and the Edge play U2 songs in Kyiv, it’s probably worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that this entire war could have been avoided if the US had simply pledged military protection for Zelensky against the far right extremists who were threatening to lynch him if he enacted the peacemaking policies he was elected to enact. .......

... But, again, we are only indulging in fantasy here. Fighting Nazis, protecting democracy and waging peace are not things the US empire actually does in real life. The US is the most tyrannical and murderous regime on earth, by a truly massive margin, and it will happily risk the life of everyone on earth if it means securing planetary rule.

But sometimes it’s nice to imagine the kind of world we might be living in if we were not ruled by psychopaths.



... It’s just a simple fact that the Biden administration is actually hindering diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to this war, and that it has refused to provide Ukraine with any kind of diplomatic negotiating power regarding the possible rollback of sanctions and other US measures to help secure peace. Washington’s top diplomats have consistently been conspicuously absent from any kind of dialogue with their counterparts in Moscow.

Statements from the administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire. Ukrainian media report that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Zelensky on behalf of NATO powers that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.” 

And this isn’t just another war. This is a proxy war being waged by one of the world’s two top nuclear forces against the world’s other top nuclear force. This is more serious than Iraq. It is more serious than Vietnam. It is more serious than any US war that has happened in the lifetime of anyone likely to be reading these words, because Russia has increasingly valid reasons to believe its very existence as a nation is being threatened. This is therefore a war that could very easily result in the death of everyone on earth. ...

............ Now all we can do is hope some small spark of sanity ignites deep within our species before we snuff ourselves out for good.



We are once again witnessing history being made, folks. Today, in the Year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-two, we get the great privilege of bearing witness to the single most American thing that has ever happened.

The Biden administration has asked top Democrats to decouple the federal government’s Covid relief spending package from its much larger bill for funding of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, because one of those two things is too controversial and contentious to pass quickly.

Guess which one.



... Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has expressed his intention to form an alliance with major lithium nations Bolivia, Argentina and Chile for the mutual benefit of all nations involved. This could have major implications for the future due to the use of lithium batteries in smartphones, laptops and tablets, as well as electric cars.

Latin America finally moving out of Washington’s Monroe Doctrine sphere of domination and into its own collective sovereignty for its own benefit would be an earth-shaking historical development. That there appears to be some movement toward that end is both exciting and scary, because the US empire isn’t known for peacefully allowing its vassals to simply move out from under its thumb. Either way, though, the fact that nations around the world are coming out against the empire with increasing boldness is hugely significant.



I remember feeling such solidarity with Democrats who opposed Bush’s warmongering. I sincerely did not know it was just empty political posturing for them and they’d happily sign off on any war no matter how insane as long as the president doing it had a (D) next to their name.

❖

All the Democratic Party’s actions make sense when you switch from thinking of it as a political party whose job is to enact the will of voters to thinking about it as a narrative control operation whose job is to prevent the local riff raff from tampering with the gears of a globe-spanning empire.

The US doesn’t have political parties, it has narrative control ops disguised as political parties. One of them overtly promotes capitalism and imperialism by appealing to Americans’ worst impulses, the other covertly diverts healthy impulses back into capitalism and imperialism. ...

❖

So what we need from you Americans is your continued military support, your continued financial support, your continued moral support, and your LIVE FROM NEW YORK IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!

[music starts playing, we all die a little inside]



I’ve been watching The John Wayne Gacy Tapes on Netflix, which features previously unheard recordings of the serial killer known as “The Killer Clown” who murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men in the 1970s. I wasn’t able to finish it because I don’t have that kind of stomach, but what jumped out at me listening to him was the way he talked about how much he loved power and what an easy time he had manipulating his way up the ladders of political influence.

Really makes you think about how many psychopaths who are just a little bit more functional must be in politics today, on all levels. Psychopaths who are deeply messed up inside but not quite so messed up that they enjoy strangling teenage boys to death after raping and torturing them. Or if they are that messed up they’re clever enough to avoid getting caught. Or if they are that messed up and not clever enough to avoid getting caught, but their fetish for murder and suffering is satiated by something that’s considered politically acceptable in our society, like war.

I mean, think about it. What kind of person seeks power over others? Psychologists have been saying for years that psychopaths routinely ascend to power not just in political spheres but in business, academia and law enforcement as well. The competition-based models that shape our society tend to reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top, and the type of person who is willing to do whatever it takes to get to the top happens to be the type of person who enjoys the power which comes from being at the top.

When all your systems inevitably reward psychopaths with power and money, you will necessarily find yourself ruled by psychopaths.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Kunstler: The way financial markets puked this week, they must have started reading the news. Let’s face it, the headlines are a little short of reassuring. The $6.49 price on a gallon of diesel is enough alone to tell you that the nation can’t do business the way it’s set up to do, and there isn’t a new model for running things ready to launch — not even Klaus Schwab’s utopia of robots and eunuchs.


Tweet Thread:

Austerity is Murder: 1. For 40 plus years, the neoliberal era has reigned.
During that time, people have had little by way of resistance from the lies, deceit and self imposed prisons of ineffectual domestic governance and austerity.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Vijay Balasubramanian investigates whether the fabric of the universe might be built from information, and what it means that physicists can even ask such a question.

In 1989, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, popularizer of the term “black hole,” proposed a radical new way to think about the universe. Quantum particles may shape-shift and disappear, but we can always count on information: the answers revealed when we ask questions through measurements. Wheeler speculated that bits of information — whether something is present or absent, up or down, 0 or 1 — could be the fundamental ingredients of reality. “Every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications,” he wrote in an essay envisioning an “it from bit” cosmos...


What John Deere did to Russian looters, anyone can do to farmers, anywhere.

Here’s a delicious story: CNN reports that Russian looters, collaborating with the Russian military, stole 27 pieces of John Deere farm equipment from a dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, collectively valued at $5,000,000. The equipment was shipped to Chechnya, but it will avail the thieves naught, because the John Deere dealership reached out over the internet and bricked these tractors, using an in-built kill-switch.

Since that story ran last week, I’ve lost track of the number of people who sent it to me. I can see why: it’s a perfect cyberpunk nugget: stolen tractors rendered inert by an over-the-air update, thwarting the bad guys. It could be the climax of a prescient novella in Asimov’s circa 1996.

But I’m here to tell you: this is not a feel-good story.

I mean, sure. In the short term, it’s really cool to think of those looters arriving in Chechnya only to discover that their looted tractors and combines and such are only good for spare parts (and maybe not even that).

But if you scratch the surface of that cinematic comeuppance, what you find is a far scarier parable about the way that cyberwarfare could extrude itself into the physical world. After all, if John Deere’s authorized technicians can reach out and brick any tractor or combine, anywhere in the world, then anyone who suborns, hacks or blackmails a John Deere technician — say, Russia’s storied hacker army, who specialize in mass-scale infrastructure attacks, which they perfect by attacking Ukrainian embedded systems — can do the exact same thing.

Why are John Deere tractors kill-switched in the first place?

Here’s a hint: the technology was not invented to thwart Russian looters.

No, it was invented to thwart American farmers. ...


Preventing this attachment to screens is the most effective response to the teen mental health crisis. No one wants to acknowledge this.



Satirical Fare:

****** Rgger: One Flu Over the Cuckoo's Nest

SO MANY GREAT PICTURES!


Pics of the Week:







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