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Friday, May 27, 2022

2022-05-27

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

Economic and Market Fare:


Since the start of the pandemic, global demand for tradable goods relative to non-tradable services has been exceptionally high. This column argues that this unusual demand pattern can push the global economy into stagflation, driven by scarcity of tradable goods. Countries running trade deficits export high inflation abroad, while policies that boost production of tradable goods and current account surpluses act as a benign disinflationary force. Due to a free riding problem, national monetary authorities may fall into a coordination trap leading to excessively high unemployment. High energy prices exacerbate all these effects.



... What do you think the government does? Do they reach for more stimulus to appease voters into the election? Or do they realize that it was excessive stimulus that caused this mess? What does the Fed do? Do they continue to chase oil higher by raising rates? Or do they accept that Biden is fixated on creating an energy crisis? Does the Fed simply throw their collective hands up and say that the price of oil is now outside of their mandate? Or do they continue on autopilot because inflation is in the teens? Does the Fed let everything detonate? Or do they do their best to ameliorate the effects of the accelerating energy crisis on the rest of the economy? 

If you’ve read this blog before, you probably can guess at where I stand. Oil is the wrecking ball that we all deserve. The consensus view is that the Fed will raise rates aggressively if oil hits $200. I have a contrarian view—at $200, they’ll panic. They’ll blame Putin, hedonically adjust the numbers, and go back to money printing, just like they did with COVID. Remember the deluge of liquidity over germs? With oil, they’ll say that Putin is using economic warfare and the economy needs more QE otherwise oil buries it. They’ll reduce interest rates, flood the world with liquidity and activate their acronym programs. The Fed will declare war on oil and use all of their tools. 

Meanwhile, the government will come in with all sorts of oil simmys to ensure that voters do not feel the negative effects of their failed oil policies. The Monetary and Fiscal branches will team up to try and make the bite of oil hurt less. In doing so, they’ll send oil intergalactic.



.. with the housing market about to crack, the last pillar holding up the US economy (and preventing the Fed from continuing its tightening plans beyond the summer), the job market, had just hit a brick wall as revealed by real-time indicators - such as Revello's measure of total job postings - which plunged by 22.5%, the biggest change on record (we also listed several other labor market metrics confirming that the job market was about to crater).

...  as company after company is warning that it will freeze hiring amid a historic profit margin crunch - if not announce outright layoff plans - Piper Sandler has compiled all the recent company mass layoff announcements. They are, in a word, startling.



Do recessions lead to bear markets, or is it vice versa?

That is the question Bloomberg Markets Live commentator Ye Xie asks today, and with good reason

...... Here are Xie's conclusions:
  • It took (a median of) four months for markets to trough. The median peak-to-trough drawdown was 34%
  • There were three false alarms, including 1987, 1966 and 1962, when the S&P fell more than 20% without an imminent recession
  • Recessions don’t always cause a bear market. Stocks fell less than 20% during recessions in 90-‘91, 1980, ‘60-’61 and ‘53-‘54 for example
  • The punchline: Bear markets never occurred before recession started. The 20% threshold was typically hit roughly 2-3 months after the economic contraction started.
As Xie points out, the 20% threshold is of course arbitrary and yet that's what traditionally is viewed as a bear market. Still, stocks fall more during, rather than before, an economic contraction.







Congressional Democrats have yet another thing to worry about going into this year's midterm elections.

A temporary pandemic relief program aimed at lowering healthcare premiums under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, is set to expire unless Democrats can revive a reconciliation bill that extends the financial assistance past the end of the year. And that means striking a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).


Digging into the scary headlines about a food catastrophe

... Access & Affordability versus Availability
I think a lot of the articles are conflating two very different issues - access and affordability with availability.

Many seem to be suggesting we have a problem with availability. Which is truly horrifying if true. But unless something changed dramatically overnight - not impossible, really, considering the past two years we’ve been through - this is just NOT accurate.

I won’t go into the technical definition of ‘food insecurity’ - you can read it here on page 6 - but I want to stress the differences between these terms.
  • Availability - do we have sufficient supplies of food?
  • Access - can people get these foods, for example, through markets?
  • Affordability (in a way this is a sub-section of access) - are the costs of foods out of reach of ordinary people?
We currently have enough food to feed everyone in the world. Our stock levels are fine. Productivity is fine, even with this terrible and tragic war in Ukraine. See “Where are we with productivity?” for more. ....

Where are we with productivity?

Yesterday, I checked the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) which has data from principal trading countries of agricultural commodities. They account for 80% to 90% of production, consumption and trade volumes of key crops.

I also checked the production and stock monitoring data portal set up by David Laborde, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

This why I’m saying we don’t have “availability” problem. At least not right now





Related Tweets:


Charts: 
1:


Bubble Fare:

Bilello: Every Bear Market is Different

...... Whether a bear market is short and shallow or something worse has often hinged on whether the US enters a recession, which has yet to be determined.

If we can avoid an economic downturn, as we did in 10 previous bears (see table below), we’re more likely to see a shorter and shallower decline (-29% over 12 months on average).

On the other hand, if we’re entering a recession, the odds seem to favor a longer and deeper bear market (-42% over 16 months on average) than what we’ve witnessed thus far (-21% over 4 months).

But these are just simple averages; there’s much variability within the dataset.


Doomberg: Bubble Bath

... The market era from the post-Covid lows of March 2020 to the end of 2021 will undoubtedly be known as the Great Stonk Bubble™, a time when all manner of financial instruments traded hands for unthinkable sums. Whether it be demonstrably worthless JPEGs on the blockchain selling for millions of dollars each, or an insolvent movie theater company seeing its market capitalization rise by a factor of 60 from its well-deserved (and likely soon to be revisited) lows, signs of recklessly excessive speculation were so obvious that it was impossible to not know we were in a bubble, although predicting how and when it would burst was made no easier by the seemingly comprehensive nature of the pandemonium.

... With central bankers the world over now running around with scissors sharp-ends-out, signs are strong that many of the most egregious bubbles may finally be popping.



... Collapse is ahead of schedule. The market has already reached the -20% Lehman pre-explosion level which took nine months to reach in 2008 and only five months this time. Despite being at the CRASH level AND at the cusp of bear market, I still get questions on Twitter if that means the market is NEAR bottom. No, it means the opposite, the worst has not yet begun. 

So far this decline has been a text book end of cycle market. First growth stocks imploded. Now cyclicals are imploding, led by retail stocks. Defensive stocks are weakening. And Energy stocks are in a blow-off top. 

It's a classic pre-recession market. It checks every box. And yet still today's pundits will claim no one saw it coming. 

..
Rosenberg: "We remain steadfast of the view that the inflation scare is going to pass very soon — The lagged effects from the supercharged U.S. dollar is huge in terms of the impact on the cost of imported goods. Inventories have shifted from deficient to excessive"
The stock market is following a familiar pattern of a recessionary bear market. The first phase is the Fed-induced P/E multiple contraction"
The only problem is that Rosenberg is far too bullish on his S&P price prediction as are many other "bearish" pundits, which is why sadly today's investors are being told that it's too late to sell. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. 

.... Another problem is that investor MASS COMPLACENCY has fed back into the Fed's financial stress index via a muted VIX and compressed bond yield spreads. Which means that investor complacency has led to FED complacency. Which will be a DISASTER. Per the meeting minutes released Wednesday, in three weeks the Fed is going to unleash the tightest liquidity reduction in market history. 

Fed overtightening has caused every recession since WWII, so why stop now?


QOTW:

“It's not a ‘tech sell-off.’ It is a massive repricing of abstraction.  We had a bubble in dreams.” – Peter Atwater



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

McKinsey: The net-zero transition: What it would cost, what it could bring

Governments and companies worldwide are pledging to achieve net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases. What would it take to fulfill that ambition?
In a new report, we look at the economic transformation that a transition to net-zero emissions would entail—a transformation that would affect all countries and all sectors of the economy, either directly or indirectly. We estimate the changes in demand, capital spending, costs, and jobs, to 2050, for sectors that produce about 85 percent of overall emissions and assess economic shifts for 69 countries.

Each of the six articles highlighted on this page provides a detailed look at aspects of the net-zero transition. The full report, The net-zero transition: What it would cost, what it could bring, as well as a PDF summary, can be downloaded for free here.



.... COP27, scheduled for Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November, is almost guaranteed to showcase the Global South’s frustration with Western climate hypocrisy and its impatience for the rich world’s excuses.

A little-known United Nations summit gets underway in Indonesia this week on what to do about humanity entering ‘a spiral of self-destruction’. At Davos, leaders of the richest corporations and banks are sounding much more upbeat




The Quest for Fusion Energy



Other Fare:

The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes.

... The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes. It vanishes as we reach out to touch it, transforming into the next moment, and the next … When we look out at the ocean, we naturally perceive the waves while understanding (both intellectually and intuitively) that there is no real “thing” that is a wave. The concept is useful shorthand for a dynamic phenomenon that occurs in nature. So too with the human brain, which is an ever-changing symphony of electrical firing among billions of neurons.

Contrary to our everyday intuition, there isn’t an entity persisting through time in the form of a static “self.” All our conscious experiences are being generated anew by dynamic neuronal activity. Like an ocean wave, your “self” is an endlessly fluctuating process. Memories trail along from the past, and those memories impact your experience in this moment, but each moment of your experience still depends on the exact state of your brain at that particular point in time.





Pics of the Week:

The Andromeda galaxy will eat up the Milky Way in four billion years. Here are images to remember it by.




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

The coverage triggered protests, church arsons and condemnation from Canada’s bad-faith rivals, but last summer’s reporting on the country's long-acknowledged historic shame had little to do with what happened.


Aaron Maté: Ukraine, the progressive-approved proxy war
By voting to enrich the US arms industry and escalate a proxy war against Russia, Bernie Sanders and the Squad enable a militarist agenda that threatens their political cause, and the planet.


"Chevron tried to use its attacks to silence us. They failed."





Yves here. Sadly, this model of more broadly shared prosperity might have been possible, but it seems like a pipe dream now given climate change, inflation, food scarcity, and more intense competition for other scarce resources.

Even thought this article does a good job of tracing some of the immediate factors that have led to worker in the US working even harder over time, it greatly underplays the coercive nature of the need to sell labor as a condition of survival in a capitalist system. This is why ordinary people can’t have nice things like a lot of leisure.


 
Fresh from his World War III-mongering junketto Asia, highlighted by his provocative vow to militarily defend Taiwan in the event of aggression by China, Joe Biden again wondered aloud why there is so damned much gun violence back in The Homeland.



Unsustainability Fare:

Can growth continue?



As I’ve been pointing out now for a couple of years, the obvious gap in the plans of our betters for a carbon-free “net zero” energy future is the problem of massive-scale energy storage. How exactly is New York City (for example) going to provide its citizens with power for a long and dark full-week period in the winter, with calm winds, long nights, and overcast days, after everyone has been required to change over to electric heat and electric cars — and all the electricity is supposed to come from the wind and sun, which are neither blowing nor shining for these extended periods? Can someone please calculate how much energy storage will be needed to cover a worst-case solar/wind drought, what it will consist of, how long it has to last, how much it will cost, and whether it is economically feasible? Nearly all descriptions by advocates of the supposed path to “net zero” — including the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California — completely gloss over this issue and/or deal with it in a way demonstrating total incompetence and failure to comprehend the problem.

And then suddenly appeared in my inbox a couple of weeks ago a large Report with the title “The Future of Energy Storage: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study.” MIT — that’s America’s premier university for matters of science and technology. The Report is 378 pages long, full of lots of detail, charts and graphs, mathematical equations, and technical jargon. It lists as authors some 18 members of the MIT faculty. Surely, if anyone can address this “net zero” energy storage problem competently, these will be the people.

Sorry. This is a product of modern American academia. MIT is as extreme left as any of them.

Having now spent about a week trying to wade through this morass, I am not impressed. The Report is an exercise by genius would-be central planners concocting enormously complex models that just happen to come to the results that the authors are hoping for, while at the same time they avoid ever directly addressing the critical question, namely what is the plan to get through that worst case sun/wind drought. Implicit in every page of the Report is that it is an advocacy document for the proposition that the U.S. should embark full speed ahead on crash “net zero” plans for our multi-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars economy without ever doing any kind of demonstration project to show it can work on any scale no matter how small.


Due to Breaching of Planetary Boundaries

When the United Nations published its 2022 ‘Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction’ (GAR2022) in May, the world’s attention was on its grim verdict that the world was experiencing an accelerating trend of natural disasters and economic crises. But not a single media outlet picked up the biggest issue: the increasing probability of civilisational collapse.



I was born in 1968, the year Wallerstein calls one of “world revolution”. It was a revolution that both failed and succeeded: women and minorities got more rights, often a lot more, but the end result was an oligarchy, where most people were equal in their lack of power, and where every year saw ordinary people becoming poorer, no matter what the official statistics claimed.

The 70s were the heyday of environmental possibility: everyone understood the stakes, and it seemed for a time that we would act.

President Carter famously put solar panels on the White House, and President Reagan famously had them removed.

And really, that was that. A lot of people fought, and fought hard, to stop environmental collapse and climate change, but really it was all over when Reagan and Thatcher took power and neoliberalism came to the fore. The ideology simply did not, could not and would not care about something so far in the future when there were rich people to make richer.

The larger point is that climate change is baked in. It’s going to happen, it’s going to be very bad. Numbers are hard, but I expect billions of climate refugees over the next 60 years, at least a billion dead, and probably more, and the collapse of multiple countries into anarchy and warlordism while most of the rest become poorer.

There are those who call this “doomerism”, but it’s simply a matter of facing the facts as they are. We are increasing drilling for oil and gas, not decreasing it. Animals and plants are still dying off; the Amazon is almost certainly past the tipping point for viability and is now producing more CO2 than it stores, while everyone know the Great Barrier Reef is doomed. In India we have ground temperatures in the 50s and 60s in May and the government has made it illegal to export grain.

There’s no stopping this. We will only act decisively when it is far too late. The glaciers will be doomed, etc, etc.

So, the question is what to do?

..... It’s no longer about some version of “save everyone”, it’s about “who will be saved, and how well will they be saved.”

You are going to have to make decisions: you are going to have to choose who you want to help live and maybe even prosper, and who you’re washing your hands of; who you’re going to let die, or maybe even give a shove. (I’m in favor of giving our elites a shove when the time comes, we don’t need the psychopath faction around.)



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; Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut (on twitter); new additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk and Aaron Kheriarty, plus, A Midwestern Doctor; 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:

Deaths in English Care Homes Since Aug 2020.
Excess deaths not "involving" COVID are almost as high as those "involving" it.

.... In fact, we observe that between summer 2020 and summer 2021, there were around 24k excess deaths in English care homes, of which almost 21k “involved” COVID. This leaves around 3k non-COVID excess.

However, since summer 2021, there have been a further 23k excess deaths, of which only 6k “involved” COVID. So, if it wasn’t COVID, what is the cause of these 17k excess deaths?

Perhaps it was neglect? I don’t think so, as we should have seen this manifest gradually just as it appears to have done in the previous period.

As usual then, we really only have the elephant in the room again to consider - the not so safe or effective “vaccine”. ...






Commentary:

Smallpox, money pox, and the vaccines they will try to frighten you into getting



I’ve always said that vacillation should not be mandated. It’s my uncertainty, my choice. Governments need to keep well away from the miasmic fog of my brain and let me revel in my own confusion.

Biology is, admittedly, very confusing. It’s a difficult subject not even able to properly answer the most basic of questions like “what is a woman?”. So when it comes to difficult questions like “what is immunity?”, or “what is a vaccine?” we might expect a greater degree of head-scratching to ensue.

I decided to try to educate myself using that dangerous, dangerous, Temple of Misinformation™, the internet.

..... If you’ve been following the covid vaccine propaganda information you might be forgiven for thinking that vaccines are meant to reduce symptoms of a disease and not prevent you getting it in the first place.

I’m confused - but it’s probably because I’m looking at those well-known purveyors of misinformation like the WHO and the CDC.

The entry from the Oxford Vaccine Group is interesting because they helped to develop the AstraZeneca jab for covid. What could they possibly mean by “vaccines are designed to prevent disease, rather than treat a disease once you have caught it”?

So a product that doesn’t really stop you from getting a disease but lessens symptoms (in other words, it TREATS the disease once you’ve caught it) cannot really be classed as a vaccine according to this statement from the OVG.

I really need to stop looking at these rabid anti-vaxxer sites because they’re filling my head full of nonsense, obviously.


Charts:




Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Vanden Bossche: Although I share his pessimism, I never thought I would see such a major U-turn from him. The root of our problem, though, is not the sneakiness of the virus but that of folks like Topol and their ability to become more corrupt over time; of course, fully denying the huge impact of mass vaccination with ‘leaky’ vaccines on the evolutionary capacity of the virus…. while still trying to make people believe that alternative vaccine approaches (none of which has transmission-blocking capacity) will help to stay ahead of the virus


eugyppius: This is such stupid sophistry, I feel dumb even replying. Molluscum contagiosum is a classic STD that spreads via close skin contact; human papillomavirus exploits mucous membranes, just like monkeypox. STDs are just infections with a primarily sexual transmission vector, with or without the help of venereal fluids. Like … monkeypox right now.



CO-VIDs of the Week:

Depeche Mode's song has special poignancy, now that Andy "Fletch" Fletcher has "died suddenly" (as has Alan White of Yes)
You've been kept down
You've been pushed 'round
You've been lied to
You've been fed truths
Who's making your decisions?
You or your religion
Your government, your countries
You patriotic junkies

Where's the revolution?
Come on, people
You're letting me down
Where's the revolution?
Come on, people
You're letting me down

You've been pissed on
For too long
Your rights abused
Your views refused
They manipulate and threaten
With terror as a weapon
Scare you till you're stupefied
Wear you down until you're on their side

Where's the revolution?
Come on, people
You're letting me down
Where's the revolution?
Come on, people
You're letting me down


Anecdotal Fare:

Nine in law enforcement, three musicians, two coaches, two teachers, and all too many more, including country singer Duane Moore and a "Survivor" runner-up



COVID Corporatocracy / Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

Kheriarty: The WHO's Pandemic Treaty
We must oppose this to maintain national sovereignty and democratic norms.



The illuminati elites at WEF are at it again. We shouldn’t be surprised. We did tell you this is what they were about - but what do we know? We’re just a bunch of wacky conspiracy theorists who don’t know their fundament from their antecubital fossa (which roughly translates as not knowing one’s arse from one’s elbow). ...

..... The agenda is in plain sight - these buggers aren’t even trying to hide it. It’s all framed in terms of health and protection and safety - but it’s the “transformative change” they really want.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

The N.E.D. in Ukraine.

Obvious cases of America’s covert actions abroad are typically hard to identify these days. There are exceptions, per usual: The appalling violence the C.I.A. sponsored in Syria as it financed, armed, and trained groups of savage jihadists was all too obvious and is now a matter of record. But carnage and wreckage of the kind we saw in Syria from 2012 onward has generally been judged too messy since the Church Committee, in the mid–1970s, exposed the agency’s long list of assassinations, government overthrows, and psyops. There is too much risk of blowback in such operations. 

Accordingly, the coup function was transferred out of Langley in the post–Church years. But we must immediately dismiss the notion that anything other than method has changed since subversion and subterfuge were the C.I.A.’s bailiwick.  

Let us consider the Ukraine crisis from this perspective. My investigations reveal just how a C.I.A. cutout has served to destabilize Ukraine over many years, to preclude any prospect of a peaceful settlement of the differences that divide the nation—and, not least, to misrepresent events in Ukraine more or less entirely, even extravagantly. 

This is the anatomy of an American subversion operation and the story of its afterlife, how the dire consequences of the Ukraine campaign violently reverberate today. 




Defence Minister claims Russia was forced to launch a special military operation to protect people from genocide and maintain Ukraine's nuclear-free status.


Orlov: The Secret American Plan to Make Russia Great Again

.... Ostensibly, the plan was to weaken and destroy Russia; but then, following the Soviet collapse, Russia was weakening and destroying itself very well all by itself, no intervention needed. What’s more, every US effort to weaken and destroy Russia has made it stronger; had there existed even a most rudimentary feedback mechanism, so vast a discrepancy between policy goals and policy results would have been detected and adjustments would have been made. Superficially, this may be explained by the nature of America’s sham-democracy, where each administration can blame its failures on mistakes made by the previous administration, but the Deep State remains in power throughout, and it would simply be forced to admit to itself that there is a problem with the plan to weaken and destroy Russia after a few cycles of this unfolding fiasco. The fact that it hasn’t detected any such problem brings us full circle, back to the suspicion that there are Putin’s agents toiling tirelessly deep within the Deep State.


Red Pill Fare:



An international consortium of academics, journalists and whistle-blowers now has a forum for analysis of propaganda drives today, intended for the literate public



..... Whether the plot was hatched by CIA-Saudi sponsored terrorists as some assume, or whether it was a controlled demolition as hundreds of architects and engineers have testified to (or whether it was a combination of both stories), one thing is certain: The official narrative is a lie and no matter how you try to explain it, two airplanes cannot cause the collapse of three WTC buildings.

Another thing is certain: Biden was happy.

Not only did Joe Biden act as one of the most aggressive voices for the invasion of Iraq in the days following 9/11, but he even bragged publicly that John Ashcroft’s 2001 Patriot Act was modelled nearly verbatim on his own failed 1994 Omnibus domestic surveillance legislation drafted in response to the first 9/11 attack and 1994 Oklahoma City bombing. ...

.... An incredible report by investigative Journalist Edward Spannaus listed a short list of some of the most extreme cases of FBI entrapment between 2001-2013 in the USA:

“One of the most egregious of these cases is the so-called “Newburgh Four” in New York State, in which an informant in 2008-09 offered the defendants $250,000, as well as weapons, to carry out a terrorist plot. The New York University Center for Human Rights and Justice reviewed this case and two others, and concluded: “The government’s informants introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and, moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe it was their duty to take action against the United States.”

The Federal judge presiding over the Newburgh case, Colleen McMahon, declared that it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here,” and criticized the Bureau for sending informants “trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role—any role—in criminal activity.”



CaitOz Fare:

MSM Offers Rare Glimpse Into How Bad Things Are Really Going For Ukrainian Forces

..... But this is not the movies, and this is not TV. People are dying in a US proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the US-centralized empire, and behind all the narratives and spin they are ultimately doing so for nothing more noble than the agenda to secure US unipolar hegemony.

Many of the blue-and-yellow flag wavers are well-intentioned, and really do think they are advocating for Ukrainian freedom and sovereignty. But in reality all they’ve been cheering for is Ukrainian subservience and enslavement to the empire, Ukrainian death, Ukrainian suffering, and the continuation of a dangerous proxy war between nuclear superpowers that threatens the life of everyone on earth.



There’s probably a correlation between the fact that the US is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic and the fact that Americans are the most aggressively propagandized population on earth.

If you took any armed population and psychologically pummelled them from birth with narratives about how mass military slaughter is fine while turning them into underpaid, alienated gear-turners and giving them an artificial culture mass-produced in Los Angeles, you’d probably see some mass shootings.

There’s only so far you can warp the human psyche before it snaps. Bash hundreds of millions of people in the brain their entire lives with indoctrination programs telling them madness is sanity and sanity is madness, and eventually a few of them are going to wind up mass murderers.

❖

In terms of contemporary analysis of conflict and strategy, Henry Kissinger hasn’t been one of the world’s worst war hawks for decades. This is true not because he has gotten less psychopathic, but because everyone else in Washington has gotten more so.

Yes Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. Yes Henry Kissinger is a psychopath. Yes the world will be better off when it is finally disencumbered of him. And, also, the US foreign policy establishment has grown much, much more insane than Henry Kissinger.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Hedges: The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.


Balch: I misspoke in referring to “intellectuals.” The delusions in which our culture drowns spring less from genuine intellectuals than from a pullulating mass of diploma-wielding mediocrities bereft of any semblance of overall erudition or specialized savantship. So, taking a cue from those drabs of the street who feign love without actually providing it, let’s give these vacuous expounders a more telling handle. Rather than “intellectuals,” let’s call them “mind-workers.” Fittingly, mind-work is also one of the world’s oldest professions. Since time beyond, mind hacks have been proffering exotic mysteries, secondhand dogmas, preposterous nostra, conspiracy theories, and any other form of ideational hokum that might attract attention and coin palms. But earlier epochs offered such mountebanks far fewer occasions to profitably ply their trades than does ours. The straitened material circumstances of premodernity necessarily kept the sphere of airy discourse small, and only the really clever, or officially patronized, could hope to make a decent living out of it.


Attkisson: the response to 2000 Mules has been swift and largely predictable. Trump advocates insist it proves game-changing election fraud in 2020. Trump opponents claim it’s just another debunked conspiracy theory that proves nothing. In the predominantly left-leaning establishment news media, the figures who have addressed the documentary tend to promote the latter conspiracy theory interpretation— advising people not to see the film, while simultaneously assuring them there’s nothing to see. Meantime, it seems clear that many who are publicly commenting, including some of the harshest critics, haven’t actually watched the film. So we’re left with a documentary that— if the evidence is true—would be one of the most important and impactful films of its time, but is likely being viewed almost exclusively by those in no need of conversion.




Big Thoughts:

Radagast: Transgenderism: An idea so stupid, you need to go to college to believe in it

..... And that’s the other key factor I want to address: Trauma. You can’t understand the transgender epidemic, without understanding trauma. Trauma is what you experience when you’re placed under more stress than you’re equipped to handle. As the amount of stress that we expose children to increases, the amount of trauma increases more. Simultaneously, we’re reducing the ability that children’s brains have to cope with stress.

People who regularly exercise are more psychologically resilient. Consider how much constant physical exercise your ancestors would receive before the industrial revolution, to how much physical exercise teenagers received during the past two years in which we locked them up in their homes because we were afraid of some new virus. With the type of society we have built, we have created teenagers who are intrinsically less psychologically resilient.

Children are continually exposed to messages that they are inadequate.

.........

Trauma is easiest to address when it’s still fresh. A lot of veterans for example, achieve remission of their PTSD symptoms by smoking high THC cannabis. When trauma has governed your whole life for years however, then it’s deeply embedded in your cognitive processes and THC becomes unlikely to be enough to rewire your brain to a more constructive outlook.

We have however, two other tools at our disposal, that have been shown to be very effective at allowing the brain to process trauma. Those tools are Ketamine and Psilocybe mushrooms. Ketamine reverses the changes caused in mice by social defeat stress. Social defeat stress is when you induce depression in a mouse, by letting a bigger mouse bully it around. In other words, roughly what the teenage girls experience when they’re sexually abused, or the nerdy boys from their peers.

We see in almost all studies, that Ketamine increases cognitive performance in the depressed subjects who receive it. In other words, you don’t have to worry that your kid can’t become a straight A student anymore after K-holing, they can still serve as the factoid memorizing machines society wants to turn them into.

Finally, there are the Psilocybe mushrooms. What we generally see, is that these two different substances work differently: Ketamine improves the “hardware” of the brain. The brain makes new neurons and repairs structural damage. On the other hand, Psilocybe mushrooms improve the “software” of the brain: It rewires the brain, but to rewire your brain you first want the underlying damage that resulted in unhealthy patterns of neural connections to be repaired.

Psilocybe mushrooms are very effective in reducing suicide. Ketamine is effective at this too, but it only tends to last for a few days, so it’s best for acute situations. On the other hand, with the Psilocybe mushrooms we see that a single experience can lead to a 60% reduced risk of suicidality.

The brains of teenagers are still very flexible, as people grow older it becomes harder to reverse damage that results in unhealthy coping mechanisms (transgenderism is ultimately just another unhealthy coping mechanism). ...


Kunstler: Childhood’s End


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