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Sunday, May 15, 2022

2022-05-15

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

Economic and Market Fare:

US inflation is moderating while a massive fiscal contraction is underway – recession looming

.......The current situation has not become entrenched into a wage-price struggle nor in the long-term expectations as yet.

In the 1970s, both institutional forces pressured inflation upwards after the initial oil price shocks.

In the current period, real wages are falling as nominal wages growth lags well behind the temporary rise in the CPI. There is no sense that wages growth is pushing the inflation rate further ahead.

... We know what the push factors are [now]: ...

.... The only way the interest rate rises will reduce inflation is if they are pushed to such high levels that the economy tanks into a deep recession and that stifles the capacity of the firms to push margins out.

..... As noted in the Introduction, fiscal policy is contracting massively at the moment in the US.

... So, in terms of expenditure flows, the external sector is draining an increasing amount of net spending from the domestic economy – thus undermining GDP growth increasingly.

The question then is with the fiscal balance fast heading towards balance at least, and the external sector draining 3.6 per cent worth of GDP out of the expenditure stream, what does that mean for the private domestic income and spending balance.

Well to fill that gap, the private domestic sector will have to increase its deficit and accumulate substantially more debt.

That is a particularly precarious prospect with current private debt at unsustainable levels.

And the rapidity of the fiscal shift is placing massive negative pressure on the spending system.

Next stop ?

Recession.


Are bonds a tactical buy?

One of my old macro rules was to never be short treasuries when Asian currencies were weakening. Other ways of saying this is a strengthening dollar is a sign of weakening growth, or liquidity issues, all of which are deflationary. Bonds have tended to do well the US dollar has had significant strength during the Asian Financial Crisis and the GFC. Asian currencies have been conspicuously weak this year. 

....  Unless we start to see the Chinese Yuan weaken against the Euro and Yen, then inflationary bias will continue. Bonds still look bad news to me.



The most recent macroeconomic figures show that the Chinese slowdown is much more severe than expected and not only attributable to the covid-19 lockdowns. The lockdowns have an enormous impact. Twenty-six of 31 China mainland provinces have rising covid cases and the fear of a Shanghai-style lockdown is enormous. The information coming from Shanghai proves that these drastic lockdowns create an enormous damage to the population. Millions of citizens without food or medicine and rising suicides have shown that the infamous “zero covid” policy often disguises mass population control and repression. It is easy to use the covid-19 lockdowns as the reason for the weakening of the Chinese economy but that would be a gross simplification. The problem is deeper.

China is going through a severe slowdown caused by the burst of the enormous real estate bubble and the crackdown on the private sector, which has led to a cut in investment growth.




Never mind the ephemeral wonders of digital tech: Our lives are built of steel, plastic, concrete and ammonia.

... Mr. Smil wants to correct what he sees as two increasingly common bad ideas. One is environmentalism of the kind that promotes what the author argues are “unrealistic” decarbonization goals without a serious appreciation of current global dependence on fossil energy. Arbitrary, long-range targets to be achieved in years that end in “5” or “0” are his bête noire. Fossil energy, he makes clear, remains the hidden basis not just of transportation but also heavy industry, construction and agriculture. In a few stunning pages, Mr. Smil walks you through a stomach-turning calculation of how much diesel-fuel equivalent of fossil energy goes into every chicken, loaf of bread, and tomato you eat. The other foil for Mr. Smil is a breathless techno-optimism—the promise that apps, AI or terraforming Mars can rescue us from our greatest civilizational challenges. Mr. Smil has a strong preference for physical technologies over digital ones. He is a poet of the cement kiln, the steel forge, PVC and the diesel engine. He lacks the same regard for nifty smartphones or disembodied software.


Many people work more than full time, but few earn extra money anymore. A labor-friendly president promises to change that.



Charts: 
1:


... Way back in late 2014 hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry penned an open letter to his investors telling them that he was "taking the blue pill now" - the Matrix metaphor for drinking the Kool-Aid. He had reached the conclusion that central banks would continue manipulating markets ad infinitum, thereby creating an ever greater divergence between fantasy and reality. He called QE, the "virtual simulation of prosperity". This divergence he claimed would go on indefinitely, but then end extremely badly. However he believed that no one could predict when it would end because by the time it ended everyone would believe in the invincibility of central banks. He called this new investment approach the power of "imagined realities"

..... In summary, we have now reached the terminal juncture that Hugh Hendry predicted "no one" would see coming. The point at which central banks lose control. 

... The market is technically broken now. We are seeing a Y2K level of financial decimation.



... Unlike the national bubble bust in 2009 - 2011, the current bust will be highly fragmented due to the huge number of wealthy people with stupid amounts of cash at their disposal, thanks to the Everything Bubble that made the already-wealthy much, much wealthier.

The housing bubble will burst in places where buyers must borrow to buy, not where wealthy cash buyers want to live. Those with cash don't care much about mortgage rates, nor are they terribly sensitive to price. What matters is they get to live where they want to live.

..... A large number of people with insane amounts of cash are not U.S. citizens, and they're seeking safe havens and nice neighborhoods in places like Canada, Australia and the U.S. Smart populations (for example, Switzerland) place restrictions on foreign ownership for the obvious reason that foreign cash can quickly drive prices beyond the reach of the homegrown populace. Citizens become landless serfs in their own country.

Absent such limits on foreign ownership, housing prices in desirable locales quickly rise beyond the reach of the non-rich and keep on going higher.

Many of these foreign wealthy are escaping capital controls and the potential clawback of ill-gotten gains, and so they are highly motivated buyers.

Corporate owners and buyers are another curveball. 


QOTW

“My portfolio is very balanced… I have half my assets in cash and the other half is in pain…”



(not just) for the ESG crowd:



The departure comes as the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers seeks to counter a movement to divest from fossil fuels

... “Many of them are related to social gatherings. It’s spring — school is ending and people are gathering, and COVID is spreading.”





Other Fare:

Cryptocurrencies, although a seemingly interesting idea, are simply not fit for purpose. They do not work as currencies, they are grossly inefficient, and they are not meaningfully distributed in terms of trust. Risks involving cryptocurrencies occur in four major areas: technical risks to participants, economic risks to participants, systemic risks to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and societal risks.

.. 

This is a virus. Its harms are substantial. It has enabled billion dollar criminal enterprises. It has enabled venture capitalists to do securities fraud as their business. It has sucked people in. So either avoid it or help me make it die in a fire.



Researchers say we’re on the cusp of “GoPro physics,” where a camera can point at an event and an algorithm can identify the underlying physics equation.




Tweets of the Week:
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Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Obama and Liberals Killed Abortion Rights

... As a presidential candidate in 2008 Obama promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act , which would have codified abortion rights into federal law. But once in office he never pushed congress to pass it. In typical Obamaesque fashion he would claim to believe that women had the right to choose abortion, but that he didn’t want to demonize the opposition, and he wanted to find consensus on the issue. After his usual routine “on the one hand this, but on the other hand that” on April 29, 2009 he finally said out loud what was clear. “The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority.” It wasn’t even his lowest legislative priority. Obama never lifted a finger to get it passed, even during his first two years in office when he had majorities in the House and the Senate.


Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

"We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology -- E.O. Wilson"
Last week I began untangling a string about how we as a species have evolved in the past two centuries into behaviors that run counter to our own survival. I described how modern public relations magicians had been able to capture the group attention with seductive language, and though behavioral psychology and cognitive science, to segment and manipulate how people get information or act upon it.

... These are among the ways that social engineers, and Lakoff includes himself, manipulate culture into believing ideas that are totally fictitious — by honing in on our herd instinct that we have conserved over evolutionary time as a mechanism for group survival and the reason we cluster in towns and find solace in the safety of relationships with family and neighbors whom we trust.

... It is not necessary to this situation that there be some evil genius behind a curtain manipulating our thoughts, the sort of Ministry of Truth found in George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1948). We are doing it to ourselves, more or less innocently



... Decarbonization by 2030 or 2050? Really? What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. It is rather delusional. We are building more and bigger of everything, and now we call it green. But do we need more and bigger?

... Right now, we live in this world of exaggerated promises and delusional techno-pop science promising to save us all. For more than 30 years, global warming has been making headlines. We’ve been aware of this for 30 years, on a planetary scale, all those IPCC meetings. And yet, our emissions have been going up steadily every year.

... There are billions of people who want to burn more fossil fuels. There is very little we can do about that. They will burn it unless we give them something different. But who will give them something different?

We have to recognize the realities of the world, and the realities of the world tend to be unpleasant, discouraging and depressing. 




Interview with Tim Parrique, available to everyone

[00:03:55] Tim Parrique: So, degrowth, the way I like to define it, if we just describe it as a phenomenon, is a reduction of production and consumption. So that's pretty straightforward. It's kind of the opposite of economic growth. Economic growth, get your economy getting bigger. Degrowth you get your economy getting smaller. So it's, it's a macroeconomic concept.

But it gives a couple of special features. So the way I like to define it first, it's a planned reduction in consumption, not just like a crisis or recession like we've seen during the COVID. But just it's a democratically organized shrinking of some sectors of the economy. 

Why is that? To just reduce environmental pressures. So that's feature number two, not only democratic, but also there's an objective here. It's a strategy for the ecological transition. And the two extra features are about inequality and wellbeing. 


Related Tweets:

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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:

We need to be clearer about the risk associated with any infection.


Chudov: Israel: Chronic Covid Persists in Guts and Immune CD8 Cells, like AIDS
Delta Variant seen Massively in Wastewater long after Omicron took over!

.... Having a part of the population chronically infected with SARS-Cov-2 is a very bad development. This means that Sars-Cov-2 carriers are, in effect, permanent walking virus variant factories, like HIV patients. They would endlessly produce newer, and fitter, variants.

In the past, viral fitness was determined by contagiousness. When a sizable part of the population is chronically infected, fitness may be determined by the virus’s ability to linger in the body and infect immune cells. The variant that stays in the body longest, wins.

Further, having old variants linger creates a ripe condition for the emergence of “recombinant variants”, such as Ba4 or Ba5. These recombinant variants combine features of Delta and Omicron, and likely appeared in chronic Covid patients.

If so, chronic covid will get worse over time, due to CD8 immune cell destruction as well as variant development. Good luck to the people affected.


Commentary:




SARS-COV-2 gave a lot of prestige to people with boring careers in grey offices who formerly spent their days answering emails and holding meetings that mainly serve to placate everyone’s ego and reinforce unspoken internal hierarchies. Those at the top of the hierarchies moved on, but most of their younger ambitious underlings will never let go. This is their source of purpose in life, their raison d’être. The Eric Feigl-Ding’s of this world found their claim to fame and they will do anything to get their fix of dopamine again.


Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

CO-VIDs of the Week:

*****


Anecdotal Fare:

Ignorance, arrogance, or malevolence... a tragedy none the less.

There are too many perfectly healthy people nowadays (and now a gorilla) who suddenly pass from heart issues, strokes, or multiple organ failures following the safe and effective vaccine.


Pushback Fare:

A Joint Statement, representing 17,000 Physicians and Medical Scientists to end the National Emergency, Restore Scientific Integrity, and Address Crimes Against Humanity.



COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

********** Spartacus: COVID-19 Deep Dive IX: Addendum
And now, the finale

Based on the previous articles, as well as some new information, it is possible to draw a large number of possible conclusions.

This is a summary of those conclusions. It is not exhaustive by any means.
  • COVID-19 is not the disease the public has been told that it is. Far from being a simple respiratory disease, it is, in fact, a virus that attacks human vascular walls, occasionally triggering oxidative stress and severe sepsis. However, its lethality overall appears very limited, especially in younger individuals with a healthy vascular endothelium.
  • The best way to counteract COVID-19 is actually chronic exercise and a balanced, antioxidant-rich, endothelial support diet, particularly a diet high in Vitamin D, dietary nitrate, selenium, and other master redox regulators that support endothelial health.
  • Comorbidities such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity cause SARS-CoV-2 to replicate faster by altering gene expression and the redox environment in the body to favor the virus.
  • Ventilators and steroids alone are insufficient to treat COVID-19 sepsis, which entails aggressive lipid peroxidation, ferroptosis, parthanatos, and DAMP accumulation in the tissues, which O2 merely accelerates by creating more damaging radicals, and then, those damaging radicals go on to make the tissues steroid-insensitive by interfering with glucocorticoid receptors, resulting in inflammatory rebound. This is a catch-22, since people need O2 to survive, of course.
  • COVID-19 vaccines were all rushed and use barely-tested, Pentagon-funded gene transfection techniques to get human cells to act as bioreactors and produce viral proteins, with unknown and potentially lethal consequences for those cells.
  • The lipid nanoparticles used in mRNA vaccines are potent allergens.
  • Pseudouridylated mRNA itself may resist breakdown by nucleases, promote stop codon readthrough and the subsequent production of junk proteins with unknown conformational properties, may reverse-transcribe into the genome by LINE-1 retrotransposon activity, and may inhibit toll-like receptors.
  • SARS-CoV-2 Spike itself is a nasty toxin, is pro-coagulant and amyloidogenic, capable of binding to LFA-1 integrins and harming immune cells, and may weaken the integrity of vascular endothelial cells and penetrate the blood-brain barrier.
  • Biodistribution studies demonstrate that these vaccines do not stay in deltoid muscle tissue in the shoulder, but in fact travel all over the body, potentially triggering myocarditis, Bell’s Palsy, autoimmune hepatitis, and other severe reactions.
  • People have been subjected to appalling vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, threats of job loss, and other acts of government bullying to compel them to inject this poison into their bodies. When people have tried resisting through peaceful protest, they have found their funding cut off, their bank accounts seized under laws targeting terrorists and subversive actors.
  • Many non-vaccine treatments for COVID-19 have been suppressed with the help of the media, by biased scientific studies with clear conflicts of interest. The lack of a proper early outpatient treatment protocol has killed untold thousands of people.
  • ........
  •  .......
  • James Giordano is a bioethicist who has been trying to warn people about the ongoing militarization of what he calls NeuroS/T, or Neuroscience and Technology. These technologies include novel incapacitating agents based on nanoparticles that disrupt neural networks that modulate human behavior, potentially inciting aggression, inflicting memory loss, or causing other deleterious effects in the manner of a subtle chemical weapon.
  •  .....
  •  ...
  • Incidentally, SARS-CoV-2 Spike attacks the vascular endothelium and increases the permeability of the blood-brain barrier.
  • There have been numerous independent reports of graphene oxide and other strange contaminants in vaccine vials, as well as unconfirmed reports of vaccinated people giving off Bluetooth MAC addresses with unspecified vendor codes.
  •  ....
  •  ..
  • The authorities have put significant effort into rebuking the lab leak theory of COVID-19’s origins to cover up all of this, and to bully the public into compliance with their insane directives.
Credit where it’s due; a lot of this information came from Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. David Martin, Dr. James Giordano, Steve Kirsch, Walter Chesnut, Whitney Webb, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, Charles Rixey and DRASTIC Research, Jikky and Billy Bostickson on Twitter, and many others who have all done extremely exhaustive work digging into mounds of documents and uncovering these and other shocking details. We salute you.

From this collection of facts, one can reasonably conclude that we are in the middle of a global coup d'état supported by agents of the New World Order who have been emplaced in our governments and are trying to bring about a technocratic society, replacing existing power structures with newly devised ones.

Their goal is an (allegedly) multipolar world of government-corporate collaboration, silencing the voice of the citizenry and implementing sustainability initiatives that will result in widespread degrowth and subsequent depopulation. Their methods include deplatforming, debanking, political manipulation, eugenics, human augmentation (transhumanism/human tracking and manipulation through the so-called Internet of Bodies), and the implementation of Smart Cities worldwide to support the aforementioned things, as well as the mass poisoning and possible sterilization of unbelievable numbers of people.

Mandatory vaccination is how they get their foot in the door. Using public health and pandemic prevention as the excuse, they plan on surreptitiously implanting people with advanced technology, cattle-tagging and tracking them wirelessly and gathering their biometric data.

The overall goal is the creation of a globe-spanning biosecurity surveillance state with sharply curtailed civil rights and no upward mobility, where servitization replaces property ownership and there is a caste system consisting of a wealthy overclass, obedient citizens, and untouchables who, like the Scraps in Demolition Man, refuse to be cattle-tagged. ...


Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

The globalist empire insists always and everywhere that it is fighting the last war, even as it inches closer to the next one.

A long time ago, everybody understood that war was an armed and violent enterprise undertaken by soldiers to achieve specific objectives. One was expected to hate the enemy and his goals, but even the most egregious jingoists were clear that the enemy had goals, and that their side did too. Now that Europe faces its most significant armed conflict since 1945, we are discouraged from understanding war in this way. The dominant message is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a bluntly evil thing, which the evil Vladimir Putin is perpetrating for vague evil expansionist purposes, or because he is crazy, or both. To judge from press reports, war is no longer something that soldiers wage, in battles, at the front; instead, it is an undifferentiated atrocity wrought upon civilians at home. For every sloppy, low-resolution piece the media publish on the strategic situation in Donbas, there are ten about mourning parents of fallen soldiers, about refugees, about air strikes on schools, about subway bomb shelters, about alleged war crimes against civilians.

I’m not saying that war isn’t violent, or that civilian casualties don’t matter. I’m saying that you can’t understand what is happening in this war as a mere series of atrocities, and I’m also saying that press narratives of Russian war crimes are a monumental hypocrisy. They proceed from the American empire, which since World War II has demonstrated ruthless, near-total indifference to the civilian victims of their air campaigns. What’s happening in the Ukraine is nothing compared to the brutal shock and awe tactics that killed hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in Iraq.

Recasting every global conflict as a 1940s morality play of genocidal evildoer vs. all that is righteous and good, is very dangerous. It has created a groundswell of popular demand for escalation against a nuclear-armed power, which the political actors themselves don’t always seem prudent enough to resist. .... I’m not a geopolitical analyst, so I can’t realistically evaluate the risk of escalation, but I know that people massively underestimate the likelihood of rare catastrophic outcomes, and that nuclear war heads the list of both rare and catastrophic. To the extent the empire underestimates the risk, it will keep pushing. ...

... All of this confirms my long-running thesis, that the empire is firmly post-political. It employs political forms purely as a matter of expedience; its only real principles are expansion, assimilation and atomised consumerism. ...



.... Now everything I just told you, Professor Chomsky, John Mearsheimer and others will acknowledge it. The mainstream press won’t even acknowledge that but people who call themselves just, legitimately call themselves dissidents, although Mearsheimer wouldn’t call himself a dissident, he just calls himself a realist. Nice guy, I consider him a friend, I like him. They’ll acknowledge all that. But then they say the invasion was criminal. Criminal invasion, criminal, criminal, criminal. And my question which I’ve constantly been putting in correspondence is a very simple one: if you agree that for 20 years—more than 20 years, more than two decades—, Russia has tried to engage in diplomacy; if you agree that the Russian demand to neutralize Ukraine —not occupy it, not determine its government, its form of economy, just neutralize it like Austria after World War II—, if you agree that was a legitimate demand; if you agree that the West was expanding and expanding NATO; if you agree that Ukraine de facto had become a member of NATO, weapons pouring in, engaging in military exercises in NATO; and if you agree… You know, Russia lost 30 million people during World War II because of the Nazi invasion, so there’s a legitimate concern by Russia with all of these —if you excuse my language— Nazis floating around in the Ukraine, then the simple question is: What was Russia to do?

....  No, no, you know I can’t go for it, I can’t go for those who acknowledge the legitimacy of the arguments made by Putin but then call the invasion criminal. I don’t see that.

... You referred to the pre-emptiveness. Russia tried for 22 years. That’s giving a lot of time to diplomacy! 22 years is a lot of time! And the question is: at what point, at what point does Russia get to act? When there are nuclear-tipped missiles on its border? Is that when it gets to act? I don’t agree with that.



... From the author’s perspective, what is currently happening in Ukraine is a conflict between the Russian and Western concepts of war, that is, the concept of war as conceived by NATO. Among other things, this conflict is also a question of the prestige for the West, which has so far seen itself as the most militarily capable bloc on the planet. Having trained Ukrainian ground army[50] to NATO standards and equipped it with anti-tank and anti-aircraft portable systems, the West is now observing performance of these forces against Russian troops. This is, as well, one of reasons for the omnipresent Western propaganda campaign. Moreover, within this conflict, it is necessary to view Ukrainian media and propaganda sources as organic offshoots of Western intelligence agencies and public relations firms, of which at least 150 have participated in creating and spreading propaganda for Kiev since the beginning of hostilities.

Likewise, make no mistake, majority if not all intelligence at disposal of Kiev is of NATO origin. In an event that Ukrainian troops are defeated by Russian units, it will be clear that equipping and training army in accordance with NATO standards does not guarantee the highest level of combat capability. At the same time, the possible defeat of Ukraine will shake the reputation of NATO itself, especially the United States, whose last year’s debacle in Afghanistan is still fresh in memory. Russia’s eventual victory would be the second major case in modern times where forces equipped and trained by the West have been defeated by non-Western armies. ...



Antonio Guterres is the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN), who attempted last month  to arrange the escape from Russian capture of Ukrainian soldiers and NATO commanders,  knowing they had committed war crimes. He was asked to explain; he refuses.   

Trevor Cadieu is a Canadian lieutenant-general who was appointed the chief of staff and head of the Canadian Armed Forces last August; was stopped in September; retired from the Army this past April, and went to the Ukraine, where he is in hiding. From whom he is hiding – Canadians or Russians – where he is hiding, and what he will say to explain are questions Cadieu isn’t answering, yet.

Guterres isn’t the first UN secretary-general to be investigated for abetting war crimes against civilians. ...





... For example, materials indicating the intentional use of a multidrug-resistant tuberculosis pathogen in 2020 to infect the population of the Slavyanoserbsky district of the LPR were examined.

The flyers, made in the form of counterfeit currency notes, were infected with the tuberculosis agent and distributed to minors in Stepovoe village. 




Thus "our free press" has millions on "the left" ferociously supporting neo-Nazi thugs (and pushing for an ever hotter war that's threatening all of us with nuclear extinction)



........ Here’s the point, though: in a prior political context, the purported existence of Nazis was supposed to prompt an earnest outpouring of shock, horror, and counter-Nazi mobilization. But in the current political context, the existence of Nazis is supposed to be carefully ignored — in service what is now the superseding imperative, namely to “Stand with Ukraine.”

.... Gee whiz, what a strange development: two of the most lavishly-funded advocacy organizations which had been zealously devoted to the cause of monitoring “Nazis” during the Trump years — when they would declare a state of emergency anytime a purported “Nazi” sneezed — now have absolutely nothing to say about open displays of support for a foreign Battalion whose uniforms are blatantly covered with what these organizations themselves identify as “hate symbols!”




....
....

... 


Orwellian Fare:

Are You a Victim of Menticide? Look for These 10 Signs!
“Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which a powerful dictator can imprint his own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those he plans to use and destroy.”

* * *

“Ready made opinions can be distributed day by day through press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern of thought in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian theoreticians, of good propaganda technique, and the polls a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind.”

—Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind
........................ Only you can liberate yourself from willful stupidity. Continuing to read this article and being willing to implement these twelve steps proves you have the intelligence to do so.

All you have to lose are your manufactured delusions; misplaced pride; gullibility; fear; terror; anxiety; rage; and mental and physical enslavement.

In exchange, you gain an independent mind; critical-thinking abilities; research skills; fact-based knowledge; confidence in your understanding; internal peace; empowerment; mental and physical health; and maybe even your life.


The United States of O.C.D.

This is the second of four essays, to appear occasionally, on the “bubble of pretend” within which most Americans shelter their psyches. The thought binding these pieces is that we must come to terms with our crippled psychological and emotional states if we are to find our ways beyond them.

... Father, forgive them, I thought, for they know not what blood-soaked horrors and hate-filled killers they enthusiastically endorse.

Not in my lifetime have Americans purporting to be thoughtful intelligent people been so wide-eyed, so stupefied as those who are pretending to lead them and to inform them by seeking to bury them in ignorance.

........ Our better reference is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, wherein the English novelist pictured a society of incubated beings—programmed from birth, hooked on a happiness-inducing drug called soma, devoid of everything we now consider human, wholly incapable of connection, of responsibility, and, indeed, desiring neither. Infantile gratification is all that matters to those populating the World State Huxley imagined—such as anything matters.

We are not there yet, let’s not exaggerate. But we ought to honor Huxley for his prescience, for we are heading in the direction of his unlivable world of mind-deprived children watched over by a small, chosen, diabolic elite. 

...... Mass acquiescence leads us most of the way to an explanation of the preposterous support most Americans have for the criminal regime in Kiev. But we’re beyond Steve Fraser’s Age of Acquiescence now. Americans don’t merely acquiesce to all that the imperium imposes on the world—wars, interventions, collective punishments, assorted other deprivations. Americans actively embrace the conduct of empire.

Please pass the kale chips. ....



....It is an apt comment on the state of news.

News organizations are now frequently used as tools to further certain narratives and propaganda, letting their employees know that any that are facts off-the-narrative are unwelcome.

I tracked this trend at CBS News prior to asking to leave my contract midstream due to the disturbing trends.

Similar stories have now been uncovered at many major news organizations where the news is too often not about facts and public interest but is a carefully curated product of corporate and political interests.


CaitOz Fare:


... Horror author Stephen King made the bizarre decision to tweet “I stand with Nina Jankowicz” the other day in support of the freaky shitlib who will be leading the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth. Nothing really to say about that beyond what it is.

This kind of thing happens so often because within an empire that is held together by propaganda, capitalism and mass military violence, those who are elevated to prominence within that empire have a symbiotic relationship with those things.

.... So fame is a self-reinforcing feedback loop of support for establishment power in numerous ways, and it’s a major problem. It’s a major problem because it means that the people with the most influential voices in our society will always necessarily be people who have benefited tremendously from status quo systems.




Other Quotes of the Week:

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended.

Lieven: Finnish & Swedish accession to NATO may also be seen to have marked the symbolic moment when European countries as a whole abandoned any dream of taking responsibility for their own continent and resigned themselves to complete dependence on Washington.

C.J. Hopkins: I don’t know about you, but I kind of feel like the threat of global thermonuclear war qualifies as a “different kind of ugly.” And, OK, before you accuse me of exaggerating the danger of the ungodly mess that GloboCap has made in the Ukraine, I’d like to point out that even Thomas Friedman is starting to sound the alarm. Thomas fucking Friedman, folks … a man with no moral conscience whatsoever, who has never met a GloboCap war of aggression that he could not support, and who has justified the gratuitous barbecuing of millions of men, women, and children without so much as a second thought throughout his long and lucrative career as an A-List mouthpiece for the ruling classes. When The Stash gets nervous, I start to get nervous.


Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

deBoer: Safetyism is the Water in Which We Swim
and you must be willing to say "this is water"



Satirical Fare:

After 5 Years In U.S., Terrorist Cell Too Complacent To Carry Out Attack



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