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Monday, May 23, 2022

2022-05-23

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

Economic and Market Fare:

Abstract:
Prevailing explanations of persistently low interest rates appeal to a secular decline in the natural interest rate, or r-star, due to factors outside monetary policy's control. We propose informational feedback via learning as an alternative explanation for persistently low rates, where monetary policy plays a crucial role. We extend the canonical New Keynesian model to an incomplete information setting where the central bank and the private sector learn about r-star and infer each other's information from observed macroeconomic outcomes. An informational feedback loop emerges when each side underestimates the effect of its own action on the other's inference, possibly leading to large and persistent changes in perceived r-star disconnected from fundamentals. Monetary policy, through its influence on the private sector's beliefs, endogenously determines r-star as a result. We simulate a calibrated model and show that this `hall-of-mirrors' effect can explain much of the decline in real interest rates since 2008.



Felix [Zulauf] thinks this inflation will persist into the mid-2020s. Inflationary psychology is now embedded in the economy, and he doesn’t see Jerome Powell as another Paul Volcker. But he also doesn’t foresee 70s-style stagflation. It will be “something else” that will destroy confidence in both institutions and currencies. Then people will turn to gold.


Wray: Is It Time for Rate Hikes? (pdf)
The Fed Cannot Engineer a Soft Landing but Risks Stagflation by Trying

Roughly two years into the economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, the topic of elevated inflation dominates the economic policy discourse in the United States. And the aggressive use of fiscal policy to support demand and incomes has commonly been singled out as the culprit. Equally as prevalent is the clamor for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to relieve inflationary pressures. According to Research Scholar Yeva Nersisyan and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray, this narrative is flawed in a number of ways. The problem with the US economy is not one of excess of demand in their view, and the Federal Reserve will not be able to engineer a “soft landing” in the way many seem to be expecting. The authors also deliver a warning: excessive tightening, combined with headwinds in 2022, could lead to stagflation. Moreover, while this recovery looks robust in comparison to the jobless recoveries and secular stagnation that have typified the last few decades, in Nersisyan and Wray’s estimation there are few signs of an overheating economy to be found in the macro data. In their view, this inflation is not centrally demand driven; rather dynamics at the micro-level are playing a much more central role in driving the price increases in question, while significant supply chain problems have curtailed productive capacity by disrupting the availability of critical inputs.

The authors suggest there is a better way to conduct policy—one oriented around targeted investments that would increase our real resource space. This will serve not only to address inflationary pressures, according to Nersisyan and Wray, but also the far more pressing climate emergency.





..... In short, as BofA economist Stephene Juneau writes, the drop in job postings is a sign that labor demand is beginning to cool, although there will be a distinct lag between the crack seen by such 3rd party data collectors as Revelio and the US Department of Labor

... Fine, the skeptics will counter, "this is just one indicator. What about other real-time reads of the job market?"

Well, aside from the Revelio data, there are plenty of other signs of moderating labor demand. Consider the following:
  1. The share of businesses planning to increase employment in the NFIB small business survey has fallen by 8%  since December 2021 to 20% in April.
  2. Challenger Job cuts increased by 6% Y/Y in April, the first annual increase in fifteen months.
  3. In an ominous return to the "normlacy" that defined the stagnating Obama presidency, the number of workers with multiple jobs continues to pick up. This is the clearest indicator yet that the "Great Resignation" post-covid trends are now actively in retirement.
  4. Even clearer proof that "unretirements" continue to rise is the latest data from Indeed, which shows that 3.3% of the workers who "retired" a year ago are once again employed.
  5. It's not just Revelio seeing a drop in job posting. Bank of America's own analysts (in this case in a note from Sara Senatore) show that job posting growth across restaurant categories decelerated sharply on a sequential basis....


..... the bullwhip effect occurs when a drop in customer demand causes retailers to under stock. In turn, wholesalers respond to a lack of retail orders by understocking themselves. That then causes manufacturers to slow production. Eventually the reverse occurs. As customer demand comes back, retailers quickly order more goods, often too much, and wholesalers and factories are caught short. Shortages occur, prices increase. Eventually production ramps up at levels that are far beyond equilibrium levels and this cascades down the chain. These violent swings in availability of goods then continue back and forth until an equilibrium is eventually established.

Last May, the beginning of the bullwhip effect was seen in the way retailers and wholesalers managed their inventory levels since the outbreak of covid. Specifically, retailers kept a supply of inventory at a relatively constant level, above that of wholesalers. As covid hit, supply chains from Asia were cut which caused a fright amongst retailers in the West who immediately began to put in orders for more inventory. A whole lot more of it. Subsequent lockdowns saw demand plummet and inventories along with it. In both cases, the actions of wholesalers followed those of retailers by a month or so.

.... if one year ago we saw the hyperinflationary start of the bullwhip effect, we have entered the terminal phase of the "bullwhip effect", where plunging inventory-to-sales ratios reverse violently higher, where supply chains unclog suddenly and rapidly amid a sudden chill in the economy, and where prices for so-called "core" goods collapse almost overnight, even as non-core prices (food and energy) explode even higher.

.... In short: we are about to see the mother of all liquidations as retailers scramble to unload inventory in a time off rampant demand destruction. 

... To be sure, not every product will see its price cut: commodities, whose bullwhip effect take much longer to manifest itself, usually lasting several years in either direction, are only just starting to see their price cycle higher. However, other products - like those carried by the Walmarts and Targets of the world - are about to see a deflationary plunge the likes of which we have not seen since the global financial crisis as retailers commence a voluntary destocking wave the likes of which have not been seen in over a decade.





Your humble blogger has pointedly ignored a lot of day to day excitement even though it might have made for fun and even instructive posts, like the repo panic of a few years back, SPACs, NFTs, cyrpto gyrations, because they weren’t of systemic importance and I didn’t want to dignify some of the prevailing story lines by trying to debunk them.1 I had thought to write about inflation tonight but was instead arrested by the front page of the Financial Times. It struck me that the evidence of a multi-fronted breakdown of our political/economic system is becoming too great to ignore.

....... There’s a whistling-past-the-graveyard quality to this discussion. Maybe they don’t want to spook investors, but they act as if they can’t see the train bearing down on them/ Capitalism in advanced economies is at real risk of not delivering on its promise of provisioning at least adequately for the majority of people, particularly those who work.

There’s also a failure to admit to the political and economic fault lines between the US and Europe, and their Asian protectorates, Japan and South Korea, versus China, Russia, India, the Middle East, and the Global South. That schism is made worse by Russia’s strong market position in many key commodities and the West having allowed China to become the factory of the world. If things get really ugly, China and India overwhelmingly dominate the production of active ingredients for the pharmaceutical industry, as well as making many end products. ...

... This is from ECONNED, one of the four possible responses to the financial crisis, and the one I deemed most likely:
Paradigm breakdown, meaning key elements of the current system are no longer viable, but that is a possibility that no one is prepared to face, since the old system seemed to work well for a protracted period. Thus the authorities reflexively put duct tape on the machinery rather than hazard a teardown.


Charts: 
1:



Related Tweets:

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Bubble Fare:


......Jackasses debating non-stop whether or not the worst is over, when the worst hasn't even started yet.

History will say it took a pandemic to create the worst case scenario of a Fed way behind the curve of monetary tightening at a point when supply side pressures were at cycle high. The first rule of Japanfication is NEVER allow the economy to run too hot. Why? Because when there is too much debt, a hot economy will spike interest rates and bring down the entire house of cards. The pandemic made the perpetual Goldilocks scenario impossible. And yet few of today's pundits see it ending.

.... We may or may not be in recession at this moment, but it doesn't matter. Because the Fed is going to keep tightening policy until they are CONVINCED that we are in recession. Which means DEEP in recession. ....




(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Stockholm institute calls for ‘bold science-based decision-making’ to tackle climate, social and economic crises


Introducing The Carbon Bankroll, a new report that illuminates that corporate cash and investments is a major source of emissions and reveals a new avenue for responsible companies to forge systemic climate progress. 



The report synthesizes up-to-date scientific evidence and analyses the intertwined human and environmental crisis facing the world today. It presents key actions that can be taken now to seed transformative change and that are needed to redefine the relationship between humans and nature, ensure lasting prosperity for all, and invest in a better future. 



Other Fare:

Provincial Environmental Election Questionnaire – 2022





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

It’s Always the Right Time to Call George W. Bush a War Criminal


Taibbi: Bush is Biden is Bush
George W. Bush returns to the news with a tad too much honesty, lifting a veil on Washington’s dirtiest open secret: the Biden Democrats have become the Bush Republicans

.... Biden is just a less likable, more deranged version of Dubya, a political potted plant behind which authoritarians rule by witch hunt and moral mania, with Joe floating on a somehow even fatter cloud of media protection than Bush enjoyed after 9/11. Today’s Biden is Bush, a helpless, terrified passenger dragged on a political journey beyond his comprehension, signing his name whenever told to appalling policies







.... The pressure on workers has increased on multiple levels. Insecurity is the norm. As I've repeatedly documented, the purchasing power of labor has declined for 45 years.

Financialization and globalization have tended to make the already-wealthy much wealthier while increasing the psychological and financial pressure on the non-wealthy.

From the point of view of the already-wealthy who dominate the media, politics, healthcare, academia and institutions, the status quo works great because they're doing great.

.... Even those with high status and income are burning out.

I realize many people will object to this characterization of our economy, and by extension, our society. But those who object must ask if their own privileged position has something to do with their objection.



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Future

.... At the start of this effort, I had no idea how much of everything I thought I knew about the world would come unraveled. But the more I learned about climate disruption, the more I began to understand its links to broader patterns of environmental damage, to the very history, culture, and economy of the modern world. I came to see how all these forces, working in tandem, gave rise to an aggressive religious faith in market-driven technologies as a path to unfettered human growth and godlike power—a creed that hallows our industrialist, capitalist, nation-state system built to privilege an elite minority, above the rest of humanity, and the growth of the human world, over the wellbeing of the whole Earth system. This new religion has ancient roots, built upon faiths that first arose and spread across the Eastern Mediterranean region during the early Holocene, claiming divine dispensation for humans to reshape the planet that shaped us, asserting divine mandate to submit ourselves to the structures of urban agriculturalist civilizations. But now the lacunae in this view of things reveal themselves garishly, as festering wounds blotching the very fabric of civilization. And I now understand why so many people resist asking the questions that need to be asked: It’s terrifying when our fine tapestry of illusions comes undone and we’re left with no clear way to put our world back together again.

Climate change, pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, habitat annihilation, mass extinction, hunger, poverty, patriarchy, racism, environmental colonialism, human and non-human exploitation, the spread of disease and blight—all these causes and symptoms of our sustainability crisis aren’t just problems. Together they present a predicament, an adversely developing situation that has no neat remedies. ....



I delve into the details of a new paper on the risks of a pending AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) tipping from the present strong mode to a new weak mode. If the present AMOC shuts down and a new, weaker state is established there will be enormous consequences to society and Earth’s ecosystems.

I use Earth NullSchool and Climate Reanalyzer to examine to present state of the surface ocean currents and Sea Surface Temperature (SSTs) and examine recent scientific evidence that the AMOC is at its weakest state in 1600 years, and that there is observational evidence that the slowing in the last decade has accelerated, and we may in fact be on the brink of a system shutdown and reconfiguration.

When a highly complex nonlinear system approaches a tipping point threshold, the system variability often increases and there is a “critical slowing down” in the frequency components of the system. Essentially, the system loses elasticity and resiliency and becomes rigid and brittle, and then shatters or breaks and enters a new, often irreversible state.

We are seeing this increased variability and critical slowing down in both the sea surface temperature and sea surface salinity in the critical locations that drive the thermohaline circulation system. It seems that a tipping point to a new ocean circulation system, with slower ocean currents and lower latitude loops may occur in the near term future.


"Have we run ourselves into an inescapable trap?"

.... The Amazon is burning and could, by itself, tip Earth into a new hothouse stasis that would end not just the human experiment, but most terrestrial life for millions of years. That burning traces to the Facebook-engineered election that catapulted right-wing Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of Brazil and the false imprisonment of his predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula had an 87% approval rating but was jailed in Operation Car Wash on charges of embezzlement after he stayed at the beachfront home of a supporter. The 2018 election, won with a minority of votes, was only one of many that year to amplify misinformation by social media. Fortunately for Brazil, although too late for the Amazon rainforest, Lula’s false conviction has been expunged and he now leads in polls to unseat Bolsonaro in the 2022 election.

Are we already in World War III? Not between NATO and Russia but rather between weaponized social media and a habitable planet? If so, what can be done to restore peace? The Center for Humane Technology offers a three-step program:
  1. Shifting Understanding
  2. Changing Behavior
  3. Building Community
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The molecular symphony that is the fossil fuel industry powers life, produces critical material goods, and ensures the very survival of the human species. Without the brilliant scientists, engineers, technicians, and field workers who keep these essential products flowing, society would collapse within months. Our political class – a collection of people who have benefited the most from and yet know the least about the hard work that goes on in the space – continues to do its level best to impede and reverse the development of our domestic energy bounty, naively assuming they can jackhammer away at the foundation of the tower they sit atop and somehow be immune from the consequences of its collapse.

..... Without a doubt, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was an accelerant, turning years of terrible policies into today’s many catastrophes. It also gave cover for our leaders to externalize the blame for their prior missteps, making it unlikely we will course correct in an intelligent manner any time soon. Tell yourself a lie long enough and you start to believe it.


Related Tweets:

McFarlan: Honestly, the world is getting a little too alarming even for me.  The wiping out of honeybee populations would be absolutely devasting.

To be informed is to be alarmed. ⏰⏰⏰


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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:

To those who "trust the science": Hey, trust this!



This long article will explain how Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was created as a result of intentional laboratory work. It will also show that the blueprint for Sars-Cov-2 was described in the “Project DEFUSE” proposal by Peter Daszak, which was preceded by years of relevant lab work and virus manipulation.

I intend this to be a comprehensive “popular science” style article, that has references and abundant links but is generally understandable for regular science-minded people, like journalism or computer science majors.

This article does not introduce any new ideas and is instead meant to be a summary of accumulated knowledge about “lab origin”. ...


if vaccines stop covid spread, then why is all the covid spread in the highest vaxxed counties? and why are serve cases rising most in the most vaccinated?

................. this makes it quite worrying that every single state in the NE is in a significant uptrend during what should be the tail end of the seasonal downtrend toward nearly no covid for summer.

this is a jarring outcome that is in no way consistent with vaccine working, especially after such cohort depletion, build up of natural immunity, and an overall milder variant in omicron.

..... every week that this keeps going on is more and more damaging to the vaccine case and increasingly supportive of the theory that the vaccines have caused antigenic fixation, lead to hoskins effect/OAS variants, and that the vaccinated are now preyed upon by a virus that inevitably evolved to take advantage of herd level antigenic fixation caused by leaky vaccines with narrow immuno-training vectors.

and herd level antigenic fixation is very, very bad.


Radagast: Are the unvaccinated at higher risk from BA.4 and BA.5?

..... If we define immunity as “neutralizing antibodies in blood against the SARS-COV-2 Spike protein” then the vaccinated will almost always seem to be better protected than the unvaccinated. Of course this is not how the immune system in most people deals with rapidly mutating respiratory viruses of this nature. That’s why the reality on the ground never seems to reflect the optimistic discoveries from these studies

.... When your observations in the lab seem to have no real resemblance to our observations in the real world, you should be asking yourself whether you’re really looking at the right thing in your lab, or whether you’re merely trying to confirm your own preconceived notions.


el gato malo: are covid boosters causing more severe adverse events than previous doses?
a look at historical VAERS data relative to vaccine dosing

one of the potential issues posited about covid vaccines, especially mRNA vaccines, is that repeated dosing might result in greater incidence of autoimmune issues and/or uncontrolled immune over-response and cascades. this can be very dangerous.

you have essentially trained your immune system to have strong reactions along a specific and narrow vector (proteins coded for by the vaccines) and if it reacts too strongly, it can do all manner of damage to you ranging from making you feel quite ill to damaging or killing heart or nerve tissue and because a booster is being applied to a better trained system, this effect might be magnified.

the booster studies lacked even the iffy rigor of the original trials and their safety data has been extremely limited to the extent that it was even gathered. this has struck many (including me) as a dangerous/reckless practice.

evidence has been somewhat scant, so my goal here is to look at the VAERS data and compare it to previous vaccine dosing.

this data (as i’ll lay out in caveats later) is far from ideal, but we do the best with what we have. so let’s look: ....

... this data is no longer whispering. this is data screaming.

this timing is more than a little provocative.

the surge of boosters in the US began in September 2021.

this is precisely the same time the spike in deaths and hospitalizations per day per dose per day started.

so this is NOT an artifact of just dosing more, we’ve already controlled for that. the per dose incidence of death and hospitalization rose 4X immediately, seems to have plateaued for a minute, then found another step function spike in late january early feb and basically increased 5X from its already 5X elevated level.

that is actual exponential growth in propensity for severe bad outcomes per dose.

.... the fact that this is not front an center as an issue of utmost inquiry is proof positive of the incompetence or full fledged capture of our purported health and safety agencies.

... precisely what happened here is far from conclusive, but it looks pretty conclusive to me that SOMETHING dramatic happened around boosters the resulted in a 27X rise in rates of death and hospitalization per administered dose over a VERY short period in conspicuous alignment with both boosters and omicron.

... accountability has left the building so comprehensively that it was last seen sprinting past elvis and accelerating toward earth escape velocity.

the data exists to perform this analysis with far greater rigor, but it’s not being shared nor are those who have it in any way inclined to do the analysis themselves nor could we trust such any analysis if they did perform it.



... The work is an analysis of the most recent age-stratified UK ONS vaccine mortality surveillance report to determine potential links between patterns of mortality and the injections. One of the explanations for the very odd (significantly lower) non-COVID-19-related mortality rate observed in the injected group (IG) across all age groups when compared to the uninjected group (UG) was systemic miscategorisation of deaths between the different categories of uninjected and injected. In a nutshell, it looked like they were classifying people who were injected as uninjected since they were ‘before the day 14 mark post 1st injection.

But, the Swedish data shows and even WORSE misclassification that truly does vilify those involved in my opinion. ...

... Not only did the Swedish Public Health Agency’s (SPHA) weekly report count people as uninjected up to 14 days after receiving a first dose, they counted them as uninjected up to 14 days after the second dose! That’s. NUTS.


Commentary:



Malone: More Evidence for Early Treatment
Malfeasance and collusion by the WHO, Governments, TNI and old media



As Spartacus noted in his addendum: 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.

Chronic exercise also mediates the amyloidogenic effects of the Spike Protein.



To help clear its enormous inventory of mRNA injections (now with newly re-extended 12-month expiry dates!), Japan has this month started offering 4th doses to suckers people who are over 60 or have pre-existing conditions and are over 18.

Similarly to the information for 5-11 year olds, I’d like to take a look at what information the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare (MHLW) is providing to people contemplating spreading even more lipid nanoparticles throughout themselves, suppressing their immune systems, and further enforcing Original Antigenic Sin.

First, let’s look at what the MHLW says about vaccine effectiveness. ...



.... “Conservatives” were suddenly the ones questioning authority and asking the tough questions about the health agencies miserably failing COVID policies? Left-leaning media were writing headlines with public health guidance from pharmaceutical company executives? Wait, what?

... The right was getting it right in COVID. But hey, even a broken clock is right twice a day, so I am not saying I now agree with them on everything. It is just that my COVID expertise led me to discover that the HHS was being run by pharmaceutical and vaccination companies exerting their influence via Anthony Fauci, rapaciously putting profits ahead of public health at every turn. And my aversion to the current government’s COVID policies existed even before their obscene Misinformation boards (Ministry’s of Truth) started to become a thing.

I am embarrassed to remind myself that, at the start of this pandemic, I was like any other “liberal”, thinking Fauci was a sympathetic fella, doing the best he could in a tough spot with a lot of critics. It took me longer than it should have to understand that he is almost certainly a sociopath, having led the U.S biomedical industrial complex for the last 40 years. Almost singlehandedly causing untold misery, morbidity, and mortality across generations of increasingly sick Americans, especially children. I don’t think anyone can consider themselves truly informed on the topic of public health if you have not read “The Real Anthony Fauci” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Then, almost as a coup de grace nearing the end of a horror show of a career, Fauci’s Big Pharma slavish COVID policies caused millions more preventable deaths, not only in the U.S but around the world.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Rigger: Gibbon half a chance, they’ll be locking us down again. But sit down, have a capuchino, and let the chimps fall where they may. The folks at Davos will soon be feasting on their meringue-utans and can-apes and smoking their cigorillas - and the WHO will quickly declare another health lemur-gency. Are we going to have ape-symptomatic spread again this time? ... There is no way to argue when logic and reason is swept away with every new wave of woke that crashes on the beleaguered shores of sanity. This new world order, this Build Back Bonkers, is continuing apace and covid has accelerated humanity’s decline into absurdity


Kheriaty: 1/ Do not outsource your logic or common sense. You may not be an expert in virology or epidemiology, or any other scientific discipline. But you can spot a blatant contradiction, you can see when things don’t add up, you can reason logically from premises to conclusions.




COVID Conspiracy Fare:

Dr. Rashid Buttar gives us a fair warning that it would be grievous folly NOT to send to everyone we know

..... Obviously not devised to “keep us safe,” all that microscopic hardware in the shots, and the other lethal junk secreted into them, are clearly there for some fell purpose, as Dr. Buttar argues; so we should all err on the side of further caution, keep ourselves as healthy as we can, spread the word about whatever remedies just might protect the “vaccinated” from the error of their ways, and, meanwhile, keep on telling everyone the awful truth about this “vaccination” drive, so that all those still capable of waking up will do so at long last, and stand with us against the powers that did this to us all.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

Soldo: Saturday Commentary and Review #83

.... Those of you who have been reading me for some time know that I have been asking the most important question for a few years now: Will the USA focus on Russia or China, or will they engage in hubris and try to take on both? The answer is now obvious: both.

This is an incredibly frightening prospect as the stakes cannot be higher. The world’s most powerful state is moving towards conflict with numbers 2 and 3. Russians are well aware that they have been in the USA’s crosshairs for some time now and have reacted accordingly, one of these reactions being the invasion of Ukraine. But what about the Chinese? What do they think?

.... Unlike Russia, China is an economic “death embrace” with the USA. The two countries’ economies are so tightly connected to one another that one cannot survive without the other. This makes the idea of a Chinese-American showdown counterintuitive, but nevertheless here we are.




Top Putin Aide Predicts "Global Famine" By The End Of This Year

... Oreshkin asserts that the United States’ attempt to takeover Ukraine’s grain reserves is going to lead to a humanitarian disaster.




good brief historical summary by Yves here, in criticism of Craig Murray's take:
Links 5/21/2022

... Sadly Murray’s reading of how we got here is more proof of the depth of lack of understanding/vulnerability to propaganda of people in the West who style themselves as independent thinkers. 

Putin has not had designs on Ukraine. The proximate cause of the Maidan events was that Yanukovich wanted to sign an association agreement with the EU, when Russia had long had what amounted to a FTA with Ukraine, which included no tariffs. If Ukraine proceeded, it would mean EU goods could enter Russia tariff free via Ukraine, but not the reverse. Putin said to Ukraine, “You can do whatever you like but we aren’t going to pay for it” meaning the FTA would be cancelled if Ukraine stayed on course. Russia ALSO offered to negotiate with the EU and Ukraine to find a solution but the EU refused. Yanukovich paused, not nixed, moving forward on the EU deal. That led to the Maidan protests, which were peaceful until Right Sector and other muscle showed up. Oliver Stone’s documentary Ukraine on Fire provides a good overview of the Maidan coup.

Putin was opposed to the Donbass republics declaring independence. And Jacques Baud, who was in charge of NATO’s weapons containment program in 2014, said NATO found no evidence that Russia was supplying arms, that the Soviet materiel was due to the separatists capturing Ukrainian equipment, which was similar in type to Russian.

Russia may have supplied weapons later but the point is that claiming Russia ginned this conflict up “over a decade ago” out of expansionist desires is a fabrication. Russia also got the separatists to come to the negotiating table for the Minsk Accords, something they did not want to do, and accept a mere exemption from the anti-Russian language and other laws and practices designed to harass ethnic Russians, as opposed to independence.

I also believe Murray is wrong about Russia surrendering territory. Russia is likely to legitimate facts on the ground by holding referenda as they did in Crimea, building on the precedent the US used in Kosovo (I would assume the best path for Russia would be to construct an independent state or statelets, but who knows what happens next). The only way they might give territory back (and then it would have to be not strongly ethnic Russian; Putin and the leadership would face a lot of domestic opposition otherwise) would be for a big rollback of the economic sanctions, which I don’t see happening. The West will try screaming that the vote was fixed, but the fact that Russia can take cities like Mariupol in 1/4 or less the time it took the US to clear similar-sized cities like Mosul and Raqqa (when the buildings in those cities were also less sturdy and thus would have been somewhat less defensible) is indirect confirmation of significant local support.



....... Of course, NATO was recognized as obsolete by many, and so the vocal promises made by James Baker and other leading American officials that the bloc would not encroach one inch upon the Russian Federation was assumed to have been made in good faith.

It did not take long for the former Soviet states to realize what lies had befallen them. Within a short time, Russia was hollowed out under the dark age of Perestroika looting overseen by the administration of Bill Clinton, Strobe Talbott and Talbott’s Russophobic assistant Victoria Nuland. The IMF regime imposed onto the former Soviet states ensured that industries were crushed, new oligarchs were built up on the riches of privatized state assets, energy prices increased, wages frozen and Balkanization permitted with a devastating illegal war launched by NATO onto Yugoslavia in 1998. NATO also continued to grow from 16 to 30 members with a broader ‘full spectrum dominance’ agenda encircling Russia with a missile shield that countless experts have warned can be made offensive in short notice.

Nowhere was this destruction most visible than in Ukraine which has today become the sparkplug for a potential thermonuclear WW3.

............ As the threat of a total war of annihilation presses upon our future along with the threat of a long dark age, it is worth asking if the west has lost the moral fitness to survive, or is there even now, the power to restore the true heritage of 1776 with a look towards cooperating with nations of Eurasia before we light the world on fire.



........ This past April, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova delivered an explosive response to Chrystia Freeland’s recent obnoxious efforts to ban Russia from all international organizations and financial institutions, revealing the real sort of work Freeland’s grandfather was in the business of. You can read the full speech here. ...



Foreign policy experts are pushing back against the Canadian Ambassador to Ukraine’s recent claim that nothing could have prevented Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. In an interview with CBC News’ Rosemary Barton last Sunday, Larisa Galadza, who returned to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv this month after the Canadian embassy was evacuated ahead of the invasion in February, said: “I don’t think there was anyone who could stop Putin doing what Putin did, given the frame of mind that we all expect him to be in. He wasn’t believing history. He wasn’t logical. He wasn’t rational. He isn’t rational, so I don’t know how one prevents that.” Barton did not press Galadza on those claims, and instead asked about how the ambassador felt when the Canadian flag was raised again over the embassy in Kyiv last week.

Ivan Katchanovski, a political science professor with expertise on Ukraine and Russia at the University of Ottawa, told The Maple that Galadza’s claims are not supported by evidence or scholarship. “[The war] could have been avoided and prevented,” Katchanovski explained. Specifically, an agreement in which Ukraine promised to remain a neutral country and the fulfilment of the Minsk accords could have stopped Putin’s invasion, he said. ...


Vid Fare:

***** More Gonzalo Lira: No More Lies, No More BS



Orwellian Fare:

Those interested in knowing more about that heinous propaganda rag should read Greg Maybury's recent two-part takedown, along with Ashley Rindsberg's book The Gray Lady Winked (2021)

..... As one who’s written or co-written five op-eds for the Gray Lady (back when it was not the total Oceanic rag it is today), and as one who’s studied “our free press” since the Seventies (when the CIA’s grip on the US media began to get some traction as a story in some outlets, the Times included, before it very quickly disappeared), I’m here to tell you that, especially in light of its enormous influence on all the other media, and its hypnotic impact on the professional classes, the New York Times is easily the world’s worst newspaper—as, some day, everyone will see, by which time it will have gone the way of Pravda and Das Reich


CaitOz Fare:


It’s often a long, awkward process learning that literally everyone in both mainstream political factions serves the oligarchic empire. For most people you have to get your hopes dashed over and over again by your heroes before learning this lesson, and even then many don’t.

It runs counter to everything you’re taught in life that nobody in either camp is there to help you. There’s a fundamental assumption that someone among them must be decent. But if you watch carefully with enough intellectual honesty you’ll see it again and again: there’s a line that, for one justification or another, none of them ever end up crossing, and it’s the line where they would have to begin providing meaningful opposition to the oligarchic empire.

At first it makes no sense. How can there be no good guys? Not one? Then you realize: it’s because you’re living in an oligarchic empire which only elevates people who serve its interests, whether it’s in politics, government, or media. The “opposition” between mainstream factions is an illusion cooked up by the empire and continually reinforced by its narrative managers.

But you only see this if you’re intellectually honest enough to overcome your own cognitive biases. Otherwise you’ll keep doing mental gymnastics to justify the bullshit coming from Bernie, AOC, TYT, Tucker Carlson, Trump, MAGA pundits, wherever your biases are located on the map.

And then when you do see it people accuse you of being an angry hater who doesn’t have anything positive to say about anyone in politics or media, when really it’s got nothing to do with being negative but with your understanding that the machine always protects the machine.


The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what’s happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press.

The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death.

.... Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea

... The Ukrainian government stands everything to gain and nothing to lose by just saying whatever it needs to say in order to obtain more weapons, more funding and increasingly direct assistance from western powers, so if it knows the western media will uncritically report every claim it makes, why not lie?

.... The fact that both Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media have accepted it as a given that it is their job to manipulate public thought about this war tells you everything you need to know about how free and truth-based the so-called liberal democracies of the western world really are. 



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Kunstler: We’re in It Now for Sure

When I wrote The Long Emergency nearly twenty years ago, I never thought that, once it got going, our government would work so hard to make it worse. My theory then was just that government would become increasingly bloated, ineffectual, impotent, and uncomprehending of the forces converging to undermine our advanced techno-industrial societies. What I didn’t imagine was that government would bring such ostentatious stupidity to all that.



... Fair enough. But this response reveals the severe misinformation at the heart of the standard misinformation story.

How so? The story focuses exclusively on the flaws of speakers, without acknowledging the flaws of the listeners. Misinformation won’t work unless the listeners are themselves naive, dogmatic, emotional, or otherwise intellectually defective. In economic jargon, the problem is that the story mistakes an information problem for a rationality problem.

The motivation for this crucial omission is fairly obvious. Blaming listeners for their epistemic vices sounds bad. It makes the accuser sound elitist, if not arrogant. Blaming a few high-status liars for the world’s problems is a lot more compatible with Social Desirability Bias than blaming billions of low-status fools who fail to choose to exercise their common sense.

..... Yes, there are plenty of other reasonable complaints about the war on “misinformation.” There’s massive hypocrisy: People who attack “misinformation” often peddle it themselves. There’s thinly-veiled authoritarianism: People should only be free to express approved views. There’s the Kafkaesque pettiness of bots labelling a post “misinformation” for soliciting doubts about a controversial article. The list goes on and on.

Still, the fundamental problem with the war on misinformation is that it scapegoats misinformation for the sins of irrationality. If human being were rational, misinformation would be basically harmless.



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