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Thursday, June 30, 2022

2022-06-30

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

Economic and Market Fare:

Grannis: The money-printing press has all but shut down

... Stop the money-printing—as seems to have occurred—and you take away a major source of inflation virtually overnight. On top of that, the mere expectation that the Fed will seek higher interest rates while also shrinking its balance is working overtime. For example, 30-yr fixed rates on mortgages have zoomed up to 6%, almost twice what they were at the end of last year. This has slammed the brakes on the housing market by boosting financing costs and rendering housing unaffordable for many. Not surprisingly, lumber prices have fallen by more than half since March, suggesting a big cutback in new construction is coming. Meanwhile, we've all heard the drumbeat of recession forecasts from nearly every quarter, so everyone is tightening their belts. Seeing all this, the bond market in recent months has repriced to the expectation that inflation will plunge next year.

[This] Chart is arguably the most important one in the universe right now. What it shows is that the huge surge in M2 growth coincided with massive federal deficit spending. ...



... [The] Chart [above] is worth a thousand words, but I'll try to use a lot less. What it shows is that commodity prices (red line) typically rise and fall in inverse relation to the value of the dollar (blue line). A strong dollar usually depresses commodity prices, and a weak dollar typically boosts commodity prices. Except for the past two years, that is, as both commodity prices and the dollar have soared. However, note the recent dive in commodity prices: this very likely reflects the repair of supply chains and less frenzied demand.  

It's also encouraging to see the dollar so strong. If the Fed were doing the wrong thing (i.e., supplying way more dollars than the world wants to hold), then the dollar would be weakening, but it's not. The Fed has not lost control of the situation, and inflation expectations are not "unmoored."


The First Cut Might Not Be The Deepest

.. what the median US CPI was at the start of the 13 hiking cycles in the last 70 years and also where it was at the first cut after these hiking cycles. Three things stand out from this and the table you can see in the chart book.
  1. Median CPI at the first hike was ‘only’ 2.5% so the Fed has always tried to lean against inflation relatively early in the upswing. However, this time round they didn’t hike until we hit 8.5%.
  2. Median CPI at the first cut was a still high 4.4%. This supports the notion that in normal times the Fed looks ahead rather than at the current level. I was still slightly surprised it was as high as this at the first cut, which offers some support to the market view of 36bps of cuts priced between March and December 2023 even if inflation is still high.
  3. The median time from last hike to first cut was only 4 months. This short time frame also surprised me. Again this would support the market view of cuts being priced in relatively soon after this hiking cycle ends.


..... Forty years of deflationary Globalization, mass outsourcing and mass immigration later and today's economic "experts" somehow believe this is 1979 all over again. Back then, the U.S. middle class was at its apex - labor share of GDP was at an all time high and union membership was at an all time high. Fast forward to today and labor share of GDP is near all time lows as is union membership. None of this multi-decade economic carnage shows up in the official (U3) unemployment rate because it's calibrated to remove discouraged workers from the calculation. Meaning the long-term unemployed are systematically taken out of the economic picture. The best way to view the U.S. economy WITH the long-term unemployed, is via capacity utilization. This indicator ALSO takes into account "underemployment", meaning people who are qualified for one type of job but are working in another lower pay type of job. Underemployment is a direct result of serial mass layoffs and its one of the BIGGEST problems this society faces, hence it's never discussed.

Coming out of the pandemic, there was a ONE TIME surge in wages, which has been conflated as the beginning of "hyper inflation". However, going forward Chipotle workers won't be getting a COLA (Cost of Living Allowance) indexed to CPI. Subsequently, today's experts have ignored the fact that wage inflation is now lagging gasoline prices, food prices, asset prices, and corporate profits. Which is why the middle class is getting crushed like a tin can by the Fed's biggest policy error. ...

... Per usual, it will take the Fed several months to figure out the economy is in recession. Therefore their current gambit of tightening at the fastest pace in history is a TOTAL disaster in progress.



... what happens when the infamous "bullwhip" effect strikes and what was formerly a scarcity of inventory becomes a glut, with inventory to sales ratios exploding higher (and in some cases reaching two-decade highs)...

... assuring inventory liquidations across the retail sector, resulting in a "deflationary tsunami" and "prices falling off a cliff", forcing the Fed to eventually pivot on its hiking plans and even restart easing.



Today I consider some statements from the Bank of International Settlements, which suggest that the mainstream inflation approach, based on the New Keynesian Phillips curve is subjected to “serious practical shortcomings”. In other words, it is unfit for purpose, which means you should not be surprised that central banks are hiking rates to stifle a transient supply-side inflation burst. Quackery leads to quackery. I also consider some recent evidence that supply disruptions are easing.






Quotes of the Week:

McElligott: "this ongoing tilt in 'upside' inflation data, and persistently reactive Central Bank “hawkish impulse” thereafter, will continue to reinforce negative impact in the rate / credit –sensitive parts of the economy…effectively “self-fulfilling” a recession"


Charts: 
1:




Bubble Fare:


We’re told not to put all our eggs in one basket. The idea is that each basket performs differently at different times. During a crash, at least some of your portfolio is supposed to hold up. But what do you do when all the baskets get hit by the same earthquake?



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


The world’s largest carbon direct air capture facility has started construction in Iceland, run by Swiss startup Climeworks AG.

When construction finishes in 18-24 months, their facility, named “Mammoth,” will be able to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 from the air per year – which is .0001% of the 36 billion tons of CO2 emitted per year by humanity.
 
Climeworks currently operates their “Orca” plant which captures 4,000 tons per year and began operations last year.





Other Fare:





Decades after a Tanzanian teenager initiated study of the “Mpemba effect,” the effort to confirm or refute it is leading physicists toward new theories about how substances relax to equilibrium.


How do painkillers actually kill pain? From ibuprofen to fentanyl, it’s about meeting the pain where it’s at


Pics of the Week:

Mesmerizing Human Faces Emerge From Carefully Sculpted Metal Wires




Amazing Vid of the Week:



Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t cause the food crisis. Capitalism did



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

Rich country governments claim the high moral ground on climate action. But unlike before, many deny their far greater responsibility for both historic and contemporary greenhouse gas emissions.


Useful for planning

.. I was thinking that we need an economics based on facts, something with more predictive-value than "the Fed's got your back", which is the rationale of the risk-asset Ponzi scheme instituted in early 2009. 

Any workable economic model has to be based upon the actual "costs" of energy, since energy powers all production, communication, storage and transportation.

  Energy "costs" are presently expressed in monetary terms, but money verges upon "undefined". Energy extraction costs energy. The EROI (energy return on energy invested) used to be as high as 100:1 for crude oil in the USA in the 1930s. For tar sands in Canada and Venezuela it is now about 3:1

.... The predictive value of neoliberal economics is worse than nothing, because it is based upon a false and misleading premise, which has always been supported by rent-collecting wealth-interests, the "Rentier" capitalists. "GDP", gross domestic product replaced "GNP", gross national product, which was a manufacturing index,based on industrial production

.... Through a thermoeconomics lens of real-economic contraction, which cannot be honestly reconciled with perpetual-growth economic theory, these events suggest narratives for crisis-management, while keeping the broken model of perpetual growth economy.  Fiat-money promises future wealth for financial investment today, but those promises cannot be kept in real terms. The divergence can be seen in these graphs:...




I first read Limits To Growth sometime around 1982. Limits used computer models to predict possible futures of resource use, pollution and population over-shoot.

At the time I thought it was right, and everything since then has come in about as it said.

I found this chart from it, with a couple of added date lines in an excellent post on the retrospective book “Limits and Beyond.”


.... 
The point, now, is that we’re about at the peak or slightly past it. The collapse has started. Covid and Ukraine pushed us into it, but it was going to happen anyway, and there’s always an inciting event. What has changed is that there was no slack in the system (and no competence, with the single major exception of China) to deal with it.

The second point is, again, how sharp these declines become, often almost immediately after they start. ...



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; 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


when you adjust for testing levels (which have been dropping rapidly) the US data look ominous

...

we can now see that winter peak 2020-1 was lower than the april 2020 peak.
we can also see that current case levels are rising fast and early this summer.
the absolute level is VERY high and has already eclipsed the summer seasonal peak from last year by ~100%.
we’re not “down 25%” we’re “up 100%” and rising fast.
we’re already above the 2020-21 seasonal peak for winter and look to have a real shot at reaching/exceeding the seasonal peak from winter 2021-22, a peak that was over 3X as high as the prior year’s.
that’s deeply aberrant and it’s being masked by a plummeting testing rate.
US case counts are exploding....

... the peak of winter in 2020-1 dropped about 25% from prior year.
then vaccination started. the next winter peak was 2.29X.
the summer peak in 2021 was over 1.5X the size of the prior unvaxxed year.
and this year, in the post booster omicron age, is going absolutely wild.
it’s over 10X the same day last year.
it’s ~2X last year’s summer PEAK and peak cases are a solid 6 weeks away, maybe 8 if seasonality holds.
it looks to have a real shot at making new all time highs.
prior to vaccination, peaks were lower than prior year.
since vaccination, they have ALL been higher.
and the extent to which they are higher is increasing with each peak. ...

... this is not herd immunity, it’s the herd getting more and more vulnerable. 

.... that’s what leaky vaccines do: they select for OAS and ADE.
it’s WHY we don’t use them.

... this is all leading to some strong conclusions.
omicron is much milder than prior strains, more so even than appears in the data. intrinsic CFR is likely down about a full log. (90%)
but omi is spreading like wildfire because it’s optimized to infect the vaccinated. their antigenic fixation has frozen their immune response and it’s clear that variant based boosters are not going to help. fixated is fixated.
and this is getting worse over time likely due to continuing selective pressure in an immune fixated herd. (how bad it can get is anyone’s guess. i’m not sure we even have a valid past model for this process)
prevalence is swamping declines in virulence and this is starting to show up in hospitalization data. whether that’s scary or incidental is not yet clear.

... bottom line:
it is the vaccines driving covid evolution and superspread and they are failing faster by the day.
the reported cases data is masking this, but the magnitude of what’s starting to happen will be too big to hide from the general public much longer.



... By now readers should be familiar with how exponential growth works, and these charts should make you twitchy.

Now, since nearly the beginning of the pandemic this blog has warned about how waves of reinfections would cause spiraling Long Covid numbers. It was obvious this would be the case, both because it appears possible to get it each time you’re infected and because even when there are not obvious symptoms, Covid often does some permanent organ damage, including brain damage, which shows up when people are tested.


Miller: The Lies & Hypocrisy Are Getting Worse
"Experts" and politicians can't help themselves

One of the most disappointing aspects of the COVID pandemic has been the willingness of adults to impose untested restrictions and policies on young children, while ignoring any potential negative impacts to their mandates.

Without pushback from the media, supposed “experts” have recommended school closures, remote learning, forced masking and now, universal vaccination for children ages 6 months-<5 years.

The lack of data or evidence suggesting a benefit to these policies has seemingly never been a hindrance to their recommendations. In fact, it often feels as if they dare others to point out that their policy mandates are not based on any high quality research.

Instead of engaging with the mountains of substantive criticism of their methodology or the discrediting flaws of the “studies” they reference, they simply revert back to appeals to authority.

They’re right, because they say so. ...

..... Possibly the most important thing to know about the FDA authorizing vaccinations for young children is that there is virtually no evidence to support their decision.

When you review the FDA documents, it’s shocking to see how little data they used to make their decision and how ineffective the trials proved to be ....


similarly, 



On June 23, nearly a week after I published an article on these pages about the CDC’s response to a FOIA request admitting they did not monitor VAERS for safety signals, and two days after I published a similar article in CHD’s The Defender, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to CDC head Rochelle Walensky, demanding to know why the CDC failed to do the analyses described in the standard operating procedures briefing document they had filed on their website.


How false scientific claims are transformed into Covid “Science”

In his 1905 classic The Jungle, Upton Sinclair documents the process by which sausage is made at a meatpacking plant in turn-of-the-century Chicago.
There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.
Fast forward to 2022, and instead of rusty nails, poisoned bread and rat dung, we have the work of Imperial College, the Lancet and Eric Feigl-Ding.

The process by which these delectable ingredients are transformed into Covid “science” for public consumption was illustrated most recently by the widespread dissemination of two atrocious scientific preprints. The first was a preprint in the Lancet pretending to show that Covid vaccines saved over 20 million lives, and the second a preprint falsely claiming that Covid was one of the leading causes of death in children. ...


Is there evidence of increased mortality associated with the mRNA injections?

Welcome to the 2nd episode of the Red Pill Report from Dead Man Talking.

... In other words, “Is there evidence of increased mortality associated with the mRNA injections?”

Given the glorification of the novel therapy, and incessant propaganda claiming it is “safe and effective”, you might wonder why I would even consider asking such an audacious question?

But by now, you will know that I will attempt to answer the question objectively. I hope to provide a phlegmatic response based on the evidence in the public mortality data which will contrast with the dogma spun out by the mainstream media.

With a bit of luck, I might encourage you to question for yourself if the benefits of this experimental medical intervention outweigh the risks as Boris Johnson assured us on 7th April last year.

And once you question that as well as questioning the nature of the public health threat, you will be well on your way to recognising that the official COVID narrative lacks evidence on every point. .... 


Rose: No more clinical trials needed
Because: Safe and Effective. Foreverrrrrrrrururrrurururrr

... Now please go to this document entitled: “FDA Briefing Document Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee Meeting June 28, 2022 SARS-CoV-2 strain composition of COVID-19 vaccines”. This is the meeting that these same financially-conflicted people will vote on to decide for the entire world that clinical trials are pish tosh - no need for them anymore. ..........................................................................


On June 28, the FDA decided that henceforth THEY will choose the variants for reformulated Covid-19 shots and NO clinical trials will be conducted to evaluate safety. Because $cience.




A brief historical look at Corona incidences in Germany

In the aftermath of my suggestion that Omicron BA.5 prefers hypervaccinated west Germans and avoids the lesser-vaccinated former DDR, I’ve heard a lot of theories. I’ve heard about about demography and age structures and population density and testing and masking rates, about the timing of third and fourth vaccine doses, and about many other things.

Here, I want to make one point clear: Before December 2021, no DDR Effect is visible anywhere in the German case data. The only discernible patterns are seasonal and geographical.


********** Heying: On not being a contrarian
Staying skeptical among people of faith

Consider cynicism, skepticism, and faith:
Cynicism is an uninvestigated rejection of that which is handed down by an authority.

Faith is an uninvestigated acceptance of that which is handed down by an authority.

Skepticism is an openness to the possibility that the authority might be right, and they might be wrong.
...... The Covid faithful often attack the Covid skeptics for not following the science.

Science is not a result to be followed. Science is a process to be undertaken, by which—over time, in fits and starts, with no promise of a linear progression—a better fit with reality is arrived at. When advised to #FollowTheScience during Covid, we have often been handed a consensus position that was arrived at out of view of the public, generally with no sharing of process or data, and therefore with no ability to vet the results.

Rapid consensus on complex issues like vaccine safety and efficacy is inherently suspect. Consensus is not arrived at so quickly, or so completely. Coercion is. Coercion is anti-scientific. So is faith. If you have arrived at your conclusions by trusting an authority, acknowledge the role that faith has played in your understanding of where we are, and stop attacking the skeptical.

Those of us who kept our scientific heads about us during this time have been vilified. Some of those vilifying us never made any claims to being scientists. Others vilifying us are themselves credentialed and recognized as scientists, and yet they stand strong among the ranks of the Covid faithful. I would encourage the scientists and doctors among the Covid faithful to consider that, having adopted this new faith, you may well be running counter to everything that you believe that you stand for.


CO-VIDs of the Week:


In this talk with Assaya’s founder Clas Sivertsen, Geert predicts in this video that a new flu epidemic will soon emerge from an animal reservoir, and that the world (except Africa) will experience another wave of hospitalizations and economic collapse. He also discusses vaccinated vs unvaccinated responses to infection by new and future emerging variants, as well as describing what it will take to reach herd immunity. Clas discusses his detailed tracking of eCT values during his recent Covid-19 Omicron infection, and go through some of the histopathology and disease progression, lack of symptoms, etc.





Anecdotal Fare:



The unregulated advancement of biotech is creating a new arms race and threatening our personal autonomy

... The key thing to keep in mind is that cutting-edge biotech poses a tremendous risk both to human dignity, precisely because the products of today’s biotechnology are not like old-school biowarfare agents like smallpox, for which treaties already exist that ban their usage in warfare. There are technologies being investigated, right now, that could form the basis of novel biological agents for which no treaty exists that restricts their use. This creates a new, unaddressed arms race and proliferation risk.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:




Four
While we’re on the subject of bodily sovereignty, I’ve seen a lot of people arguing that the whole “My body, my choice” position was invalidated by the way people were forced to take Covid vaccines in order to participate in society.

This is an entirely logical argument, in my opinion. It’s not logically consistent to say that bodily autonomy needs to take a back seat in one area and then claim it’s of utmost importance in another. Proponents of vaccine mandates are responsible for the fact that this argument is being used, and that it is being used effectively.

It’s very disconcerting that the law has come down on the side of subverting bodily autonomy in both of these major debates recently. As humanity gets more and more complicated, we may see the dominance of the notion that our bodies are not our own yield greater and greater consequences going forward.



... A think tank is an institution where academics are paid by the worst people in the world to come up with explanations for why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid, which are then pitched at key points of influence in the media and the government. “Think tank” is a good and accurate label for these institutions, because they are dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures.



Other Quotes of the Week:

CTH: Either J6 committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson is currently working for Donald Trump in a weird effort to make the J6 committee look absolutely silly, or Cassidy Hutchinson is the latest Jussie Smollett or Christine Blasey-Ford. Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony was so outlandish only the most intellectually deficient left-wing loons could or would believe it.


Putin: Speaking to journalists in Turkmenistan on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to questions about several recent remarks from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. During the latest G7 summit, the UK leader joked that his allies should take their clothes off for the photoshoot – to show that they are “tougher than Putin.” “I don't know how they wanted to undress, waist-high or not, but I think it would be a disgusting sight either way,” the Russian president quipped. “Everything should be harmoniously developed in a person, both the body and the soul. However, in order for everything to be harmonious, one has to abandon excessive drinking and break other bad habits, start exercising, take up a sport.”



Other Fare / Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Menton: Candidate For Worst Supreme Court Justice Ever: Harry Blackmun

..... By contrast, Roe had no basis in constitutional text and, by declaring abortion to be an absolute constitutional right, left the states little to no wiggle room to reinstate restrictions that their citizens or legislatures thought appropriate.

Of all the Supreme Court’s power grabs from the Warren Court era through the 1970s, Roe is unquestionably the most dramatic and consequential.  The huge significance of the decision has to have been understood by all members of the Court when it was in the works.  And yet the decision is shockingly weak.  It’s hard even to discern a logic.  Most of the decision is history and background, and then the whole reasoning comes down to a few sentences, most of them entirely unmoored from the Constitution itself ...

... Is that really the best that our highest Court could do to justify this hugely consequential decision?

You might ask, if the basis for the decision is so slim, how did it gather seven votes?  My theory is that Warren Burger only joined the majority when it became clear that its position would prevail, and he thereby got to assign the writing of the decision to the Court’s weakest link, Blackmun.

Meanwhile, if Blackmun and his colleagues thought that they could remove the issue of abortion from the political realm by the Roe decision, the truth turned out to be the opposite.  Abortion became and has remained the hottest among hot button political issues, and has poisoned the entire process of Supreme Court appointments now for several decades.  Meanwhile, in Europe the issue worked its way through the democratic process, where most countries have come to a position of allowing the procedure through approximately the first trimester. ...


Rigger: There she blows

.......... In most of Europe abortion is illegal after about 3-4 months, except when there are very good medical reasons for the procedure. Whilst there are, obviously, disagreements about this we don’t tend to witness quite the widespread degree of passion on the issue as we’ve recently seen in the US.

I think the majority European position on this is a fair compromise. Overall I’m not too comfortable with the notion of abortion, but I recognise there are other important practical and moral considerations relating to the heath and well-being of the prospective mother. I’m not wise enough, or smart enough, to untie the Gordian knot here and so I think the European approach might be about the best and fairest compromise that can be reached.

The problem is that things, as they always seem to do these days, have kind of blown up beyond all recognition. Safe, legal and rare within the first trimester became, for some, a commonplace method of contraception, a matter of convenience that could be exercised right up until birth. A “right” that superseded any and all rights that might accrue to the unborn child.

It’s this all too common push towards the extremes of a given position that, ultimately, generates the passion. The first pride marches were a great thing - it was a movement that cried for a group of people to be de-stigmatized and allowed to be treated as utterly normal. Homosexuality, whilst statistically rare, should be no more remarkable than the choice of one’s footwear.

Pride marches today are a different beast entirely. I’m not sure what battle is being fought, still, or what we are supposed to be ‘celebrating’, but one component of today’s pride does seem to be a somewhat unwholesome public promotion of all sorts of sexual kinks and deviancies. Be as kinky and deviant as you want in the privacy of your own homes - I’m not going to judge at all - but do we really need to have this displayed so prominently in public?

..... I find myself, more and more these days, thinking this emotive polarization is being deliberately engineered. To what end, I don’t know, but if we want to make any real progress we’re going to have to try and meet folk in the middle somewhere and try to find that compromise that recognises the human value and worth of even those with whom we most profoundly disagree. ..


this short anecdotal story of healthcare in Athens, as contrasted to USA, worth a read:
Living with American healthcare



Older Fare:

***** older posts by new find Fabio Vighi (hat tip, Ugo Bardi): 

Pause for Thought: Money without Value in a Rapidly Disintegrating World

The acceleration of the “emergency paradigm” since 2020 has a simple yet widely disavowed purpose: to conceal socioeconomic collapse. In today’s metaverse, things are the opposite of what they seem. Inaugurating Davos 2022, IMF director Kristalina Georgieva blamed the pandemic and Putin for the “confluence of calamities” that the world economy is now facing. No surprise there. Davos itself is not a conspiracy hub, but the mouthpiece of the elites’ increasingly panicky reactions to unmanageable systemic contradictions. The Davos crowd are now hiding behind lies like a bunch of nervous children. While they continue to tell us that the coming slump is the effect of global adversities that took the world by surprise (from Covid-19 to Putin-22), the opposite is true: the tanking economy is the cause of these “misfortunes”. What we are sold as external threats is in fact the ideological projection of the internal limit and ongoing decomposition of capitalist modernity. In systemic terms, emergency addiction keeps the comatose body of capitalism artificially alive. Thus, the enemy is no longer constructed to legitimise the expansion of Empire. Instead, it serves to conceal the bankruptcy of our debt-soaked economy.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the deployment of capital’s full potential, also known as globalization, has gradually undermined capital’s own conditions of possibility. Eventually, the response to this implosive trajectory was the unleashing of global emergencies, which must be increasingly durable and supplemented by ever-larger injections of fear, chaos, and propaganda. We all remember how it all started at the turn of the millennium, with Al Qaeda, the “global war on terror”, and Colin Powell’s tiny vial of white powder. This released the Taliban, the Islamic State, Syria, the North Korean missile crisis, the trade war with China, Russiagate, and finally COVID-19 – in a crescendo of emotions. Now it appears that a new Cold War is in the making, perhaps the mother of all emergencies. The elementary reason for this course of events is that the closer the system gets to collapse, the more it requires exogenous crises to distract and manipulate populations, while deferring its downfall and laying the ground for its authoritarian changeover.

History tells us that when empires are about to fold, they ossify into oppressive regimes of crisis management. It is no coincidence that our age of serial emergencies began with the bursting of the “dot-com bubble” – the first global market crash ......

The sick theatre of the Ukrainian war, just like the wickedly hyped-up Covid affair, is therefore a consequence of the elites’ panicked awareness that collapse is now overdue. In fact, today’s managers of “crisis capitalism” know that a breakdown is necessary for a new money system to emerge. Crucially, they also recognise that the breakdown must happen as the planned demolition of the current model, which would allow them to retain and even strengthen their position of power within the impending neo-feudal capitalist normal. Food and energy rationing, mass immiseration, social credit, and monetary control via digital currency, have long been baked into the capitalist pie of the future. Arguably, this scenario is already part of our collective imagination, as we are being persuaded of its ineluctability due to force majeure. ....

The sad truth is that “Putin’s war” (like the “war on Covid”) delays the popping of the “everything bubble”, which is why Ukraine is sacrificed to the altar of a protracted massacre for freedom & democracy. The real aim is not to help Ukrainians (nor, for that matter, to destroy Russia) but to exorcise the recurring nightmare of the “Lehman shock”, which today would plunge us into chaos, wiping out the thin veneer of monetary affluence that prevents us from staring into the abyss. The bottom line is that mouse-clicked instant liquidity is the only object that matters to the debt-based financial industry. And by deflating quotas of the debt bubble through the erosion of purchasing power and the compression of demand, the financial elites stealthily set themselves up for more Quantitative Easing programmes to further inundate the system with the cash it needs. New QEs, perhaps with a different name, could soon be announced, though they might require the nudge of a controlled accident, serious enough to guarantee immediate printing action. In this respect, the 2018 precedent should not be ignored. Back then, the pretence of Quantitative Tightening (reduction of the Fed’s balance sheet) only lasted a couple of months before being forced into a U-turn. And when the gamble was attempted again in the summer of 2019, the repo market crisis of mid-September reminded everyone of how essential the Central Bank liquidity bazooka is. ...

.................. The downhill slide of the devaluation avalanche that began in autumn 2008 in now unstoppable. Somehow, the world still believes that Central Banks will solve a debt crisis by printing more money.


FROM COVID-19 TO PUTIN-22: WHO NEEDS FRIENDS WITH ENEMIES LIKE THESE?

Hyperreality
Like a textbook illustration of Hollywood continuity editing, the de-escalation of the war on Covid has transitioned seamlessly into the escalation of the Ukrainian war, with Vladimir Putin replacing Virus as public enemy number one. If the emergency changeover was predictable, the timing of the overlap seemed almost too smooth to be credible. Corporate media’s creative choreography, however, has secured a one-dimensional representation of Putin’s war, even adding special effects when needed: from video games like War Thunder, Arma 3 and Digital Combat Simulator, to clips of past disasters. In retrospect, the apocalyptic footage of people collapsing in Wuhan City in January 2020 now appears decidedly amateurish.

................. The bottom line is that our debt-soaked economies continue to need more rather than less QE, for the simple reason that their debt far outweighs their GDP. This is why the Ukrainian crisis time-bomb is an extension of the debt crisis time-bomb. What the latter requires is a perennial QE regime calibrated through a cyclical succession of global emergencies: pandemics, terrorist campaigns, nuclear threats, trade wars, military conflicts, or, why not, the landing of aliens. Chaos needs to be invoked at every given opportunity, and with it, ideally, the figure of a brutal, bloodthirsty enemy. Whether it takes place in the media or in reality, it is the emergency loop that matters, because it keeps the monetary tap open. Let us not forget that capital is a blind process that abhors stagnation: it must be in constant motion, even when motion means accruing ever-larger amounts of unsustainable debt, whichever way possible.



By now it should be clear that COVID-19 is, essentially, a symptom of financial capital running amok. More broadly, it is a symptom of a world that is no longer able to reproduce itself by profiting from human labour, thus relying on a compensatory logic of perpetual monetary doping. While the structural shrinking of the work-based economy inflates the financial sector, the latter’s volatility can only be contained through global emergencies, mass propaganda, and tyranny by biosecurity. How can we break out of this vicious cycle?

..... By appealing to our personal sense of guilt for ‘destroying the planet’, the coming climate lockdowns are the ideal continuation of Covid restrictions. If Virus was the scary appetiser, a generous portion of carbon-footprint-mixed-with-energy-scarcity ideology is already being served as main meal. ....



A year and a half after the arrival of Virus, some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s). Why all the humanitarian zeal? Cui bono? Only those who are unfamiliar with the wondrous adventures of GloboCap can delude themselves into thinking that the system chose to shut down out of compassion. Let us be clear from the start: the big predators of oil, arms, and vaccines could not care less about humanity

Follow the money
In pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown. Here is a brief chronicle of how the pressure was building up: 

June 2019: In its Annual Economic Report, the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the ‘Central Bank of all central banks’, sets the international alarm bells ringing. The document highlights “overheating […] in the leveraged loan market”, where “credit standards have been deteriorating” and “collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) have surged – reminiscent of the steep rise in collateralized debt obligations [CDOs] that amplified the subprime crisis [in 2008].” Simply stated, the belly of the financial industry is once again full of junk.

9 August 2019: The BIS issues a working paper calling for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions” ...

.....

15-16 September 2019: The downturn is officially inaugurated by a sudden spike in the repo rates (from 2% to 10.5%) ...

17 September 2019: The Fed begins the emergency monetary programme, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars per week into Wall Street, effectively executing BlackRock’s “going direct” plan. (Unsurprisingly, in March 2020 the Fed will hire BlackRock to manage the bailout package in response to the ‘COVID-19 crisis’).

19 September 2019: Donald Trump signs Executive Order 13887, establishing a National Influenza Vaccine Task Force whose aim is to develop a “5-year national plan (Plan) to promote the use of more agile and scalable vaccine manufacturing technologies and to accelerate development of vaccines that protect against many or all influenza viruses.” This is to counteract “an influenza pandemic”, which, “unlike seasonal influenza […] has the potential to spread rapidly around the globe, infect higher numbers of people, and cause high rates of illness and death in populations that lack prior immunity”. As someone guessed, the pandemic was imminent, while in Europe too preparations were underway (see here and here).

18 October 2019: In New York, a global zoonotic pandemic is simulated during Event 201, a strategic exercise coordinated by the Johns Hopkins Biosecurity Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

21-24 January 2020: The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting takes place in Davos, Switzerland, where both the economy and vaccinations are discussed.

23 January 2020: China puts Wuhan and other cities of the Hubei province in lockdown.

11 March 2020: The WHO’s director general calls Covid-19 a pandemic. The rest is history.

Joining the dots is a simple enough exercise. If we do so, we might see a well-defined narrative outline emerge, whose succinct summary reads as follows: lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to 1) Allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets with freshly printed money while deferring hyperinflation; and 2) Introduce mass vaccination programmes and health passports as pillars of a neo-feudal regime of capitalist accumulation. As we shall see, the two aims merge into one. .......



Pics of the Week:











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Sunday, June 26, 2022

2022-06-26

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

Economic and Market Fare:


The polycrisis we are in the midst of, is fast-moving, complex, heterogeneous, interconnected, explosive. One comfort, at least intellectually, is that we are in it together. If you are feeling confused and overwhelmed you aren’t on your own. No one is outside the current conjuncture. There are different vantage points, with different perspectives, but no single point and no single theory that encompasses our reality and provides an absolute point of view.

That is a source of conflict, of course, but also of potential solidarity and cooperation.

In intellectual terms what we have at our disposal are tools for mapping. I’ve been experimenting with Krisenbilder (crisis pictures) and, in the last Chartbook, with a crisis-matrix. But tracking vectors of influence only takes you so far. It is far easier to draw maps of interconnections than to gauge their quantiative scale and importance.

Quantification is not the high road to social and economic knowledge. Without conceptual reflection, quantification is often misleading or, even, meaningless. But without it, we are also adrift. Without quantification, we have no sense of proportion, no way of scaling the importance of key interactions. No way of prioritizing and managing trade offs. No way of gauging the balance of forces.

Quantification is also, however, technically demanding. It can be expensive and it presupposes power relations that allow data to be extracted, collected and processed. This gives certain observatories a privileged role in mapping the polycrisis.

The Bank of International Settlements is one such observatory. The economists and statisticians at the BIS have for many years now made their organization into one of the key observatories of financial capitalism, remarkable not only for the wealth of the data they gather but also for the sophistication of their conceptualizations. The politics of the BIS may at root be conservative. Institutionally, the BIS sits at the very heart of financial power. But in their conceptual framings the analysis offered by BIS economists has often been nothing short of radical.

All this makes the Annual Economic Report from the BIS essential reading. I am going to be feasting off it for the coming week. Today, I want simply to read the first chapter of the Annual Economic Report, as a highly sophisticated, quantified mapping of the polycrisis.

Like the World Bank, the BIS economists start by remarking on the rollercoaster we have been on since 2020. In 2021, global GDP is estimated to have grown by 6.3% in real terms, its fastest rate in almost 50 years. Now, as the World Bank pointed out in its Economic Prospect a few weeks ago, we are experiencing the sharpest slowdown in growth in 80 year. Not the lowest growth, by any means, but the sharpest downshift in growth prospects. Together these two simple quantitative statements convey some of the drama of our current moment. ...

.......... As the BIS goes on to remark, "(t)he absence of historical parallels makes for a highly uncertain outlook”.

..... A credit build-up facilitated by low interest rates is precisely what describes our situation in 2022-23. A hard-landing may no be foreordained, but what the BIS is telling us, is that central bankers have never attempted to stop an inflation as rapid as the one we have seen in the first half of 2022, with the level of debt build-up we have seen since the early 2000s.

How bad could things get? As the central banks led by the Fed tighten policy, how might the different elements of the polycrisis interact?

One important channel is the debt service ratio....

..... Clearly, the BIS thinks that halting the current inflationary surge is associated with risks that ramify in many different directions - from loss of exports to China, to food riots, by way of shadow banking failures and possible ructions in financialized commodity markets. To have any hope of managing such a multiplicity of heterogeneous risks you need a policy toolkit that is similarly multi-faceted.



... The European Union still has six months to go before its ban on Russian crude and refined product imports takes effect, but indications so far are that the continent isn’t rushing to replace Russian oil. After initial steps to limit crude imports shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, efforts to wean off Russian oil through self-sanctioning have stalled. In fact, shipping data show that Europe is currently buying even more Russian diesel and other products than it did last year.


Kelton: Inflation
Whodunit and what to do about it

..... It’s not a debate that will be settled anytime soon—okay, it will never be settled—but it is an important one.

Why?

Because if we misdiagnose what’s driving the inflation problem, it raises the odds that we we end up choosing the wrong course of treatment. We could do something that’s ineffective or something that makes the situation even worse.

.... At this point, we all know the answer to the first of those questions. The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, and it plans to continue to do so until … well, we don’t know exactly when it will stop tightening (or reverse course). What we do know is that Chairman Powell believes that interest rates will likely need to rise “above neutral” to a “moderately restrictive” level and that he recognizes that the economy may go into recession as financial conditions tighten.

.... For now, we’re stuck in a world where far too many people remain convinced that conventional monetary [policy] is the best weapon against inflation. Perhaps we’ll get lucky and inflation will trend steadily down before the proactive efforts to rein it in tip the economy into recession. But, as I’ve written before, I wouldn’t bet on it.



..... The company tried to blame higher production costs and supply chain problems, among other issues.

Yet General Mills amassed $844 million in operating profits during the first quarter of its 2022 fiscal year, and it’s provided shareholders with $375 million in stock buybacks over the past couple of years. Like many other companies, it’s raising prices just because it can.



FLATION will be the keyword in coming years. The world will simultaneously experience inFLATION, deFLATION, stagFLATION and eventually hyperinFLATION. [..] With most asset classes falling rapidly, the world is now approaching calamities of a proportion not seen before in history. So far in 2022, we have seen an implosion of asset prices across the board of around 20%. What few investors realise is that this is the mere beginning. Before this bear market is over, the world will see 75-90% falls of stocks, bonds and other assets. Since falls of this magnitude have not been seen for more than three generations, the shockwaves will be calamitous. At the same time as bubble assets deflate, prices of goods and services have started an inflationary cycle of a magnitude that the world as whole has never experienced before.



... Even if the central bank can engineer a mid-cycle slowdown, rather than a cycle-ending recession, consumption of distillates is very likely to decline over the next year.

... In time, reduced distillate consumption will give the global refiners a chance to replenish severely depleted inventories and take some of the heat out of diesel crack spreads and prices.


Quotes of the Week:

Hansen: Whatever happens next, one thing is clear: the crisis is already upon us. Stock market declines and financial market chaos are really epiphenomena, headline capturing though they may be. The damage has already been done. And while I’ve here focused on the covid era, we were already heading for crisis in 2019—the coronavirus just provided an excuse for one last gigantic inflationary binge.


Charts: 
1:




Bubble Fare:

Calm Before the Storm

........ Mr. Bullard is wishful thinking if he actually believes a lot of good things are going to happen – like the “stellar performance in the second half of the 1990s.” There are indeed strong associations between 1994 and 2022: the former was at the dawn of a historic cycle, the latter the conclusion. The late-nineties saw an extraordinary confluence of financial innovation, technological advancement, leveraged speculation, globalization, and monetary policy experimentation.

The pandemic ignited late-cycle climatic excesses in financial innovation, leveraged speculation and policy experimentation. The unfolding new cycle will now impose far-reaching restraint on all three

..... Rather than the “good things” from the nineties second half, I fear more EM Bubble collapses, more LTCM and Russia-style implosions and associated acute instability. Global markets somewhat regained their composure this week. But I doubt the brush with the abyss will soon be forgotten.I’ll assume the leveraged speculating community is impaired. While I expect de-risking/deleveraging to continue, seeing the rally continue into quarter-end would not be surprising.

Unfortunately, we’re early in Global Crisis Dynamics. There’s faltering U.S. “tech,” crypto and Credit Bubbles (to name a few), periphery European bonds, Kuroda’s Bubble, and EM Bubble fragilities. With Chinese equities rallying on prospects for Beijing stimulus measures, China’s developer crisis has fallen off the radar screen. I’d put it back on; things get worse by the week.

.... Taking in the full sweep of mammal evolution from the late Carboniferous some 325 million years ago to today, this book is as epic in scope as it is majestic in execution.



The burden of drowning occurs in all regions of the world, disproportionately affecting low- and middle-income countries. Bangladesh has not escaped the burden of this silent killer, with children under five years of age facing the greatest risk. We live with and among water and recognize the benefits that come with the abundance of water.  At the same time, drowning is the leading cause of death among children ages 1-4 in Bangladesh, responsible for 43% of all deaths among children in this age group.


Wild solar weather is causing satellites to plummet from orbit. It's only going to get worse.




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Canada To Spend Billions on NORAD So US Can Rule World

... But it’s absurd to present NORAD as a defensive arrangement. Its lead actor has 1,000 international bases and special forces deployed in 149 countries. Rather than protect Canada and the US, NORAD supports violent missions led by other US commands

... It’s called "missile defense" because it’s designed to defend US missiles sites after they launch offensive operations. US-installed missile defense systems in Romania and Korea, for instance, are designed primarily to stop opponents’ missiles following a US first strike. US space-based missile defense interceptors able to eliminate Russia’s early warning satellites without warning puts that country on edge. This ratchets up the arms race and the likelihood of nuclear war.

... NORAD makes Canada a junior partner to US militarism. If Canada was truly a force for good in the world, a peacekeeper and adherent of a rules based international order, Ottawa would withdraw from NORAD, rather than spend billions more strengthening it.



... There are three starting points: neocolonialism, mercantilism and importer by choice.

... In classic colonialism, the colonial power expropriated commodities by force. 

... In what I call the Neocolonial Model, the control mechanism isn't military force, it's financialization and globalization. 

... The West has been extracting wealth via the Neocolonial Model for decades, and now it has a competitor: China.

As Gordon explains in our program, China has perfected this Neocolonial Model with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which offered low-cost loans to commodity-producing nations which are in effect mortgages on their most valuable assets--harbors, etc. Once the commodity-producing nation gets in financial trouble, China forecloses on the loan' and takes ownership of the resources, ports, etc.

The second dynamic is mercantilism, the optimization of an entire economy for exports of value-added manufactured goods. This is the model adopted by Germany and Japan in the early 1950s: national policies were designed to subsidize and promote exports to other nations as the primary means of achieving high rates of growth.

The priority for U.S. foreign policy was to strengthen the war-torn free-market democracies West and East so they would not fall under Soviet control, and so the U.S. enabled these mercantilist policies to the detriment of domestic producers as one of the costs of the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.

In effect, the U.S. accepted the role of importer by choice, becoming the market where the surplus production of our Cold War allies could be dumped without restriction, all for critically important geopolitical reasons. In the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. market was so large and the exports of the mercantilist economies so modest, this policy of being the dumping ground for allies' exports did not disrupt the domestic economy.

Currencies play a critical role in mercantilism. As long as the US dollar (USD) was strong and the mercantilist currencies were weak, everyone benefited: the exporting nations' goods were cheap in the U.S. and soon carved out a niche in U.S. markets. Since the mercantilist economies sought to limit imports, the strong dollar was not much of a drag on their growth.

....... What happens to mercantilist economies? They become importers of necessity, totally dependent on neocolonial sources of cheap commodities and import markets open enough and large enough to absorb their stupendous flood of exports.

The commodity-producing nations have finally wearied of being stripmined by West and East, and are starting a long-delayed unified effort to take control of the resources being plundered by the developed / mercantilist economies. This is now being fueled by scarcities in commodities, scarcities fueled by many sources

.. As financialization and globalization have reached the point of diminishing returns, they are now in the decline phase. These drivers of global growth are unraveling at the same time that commodity prices are rising in a secular trend and the global economy is entering stagflation.


The Supreme Court isn't pro-life — yesterday, it struck down a New York State law limiting who can carry concealed handguns in public, a ruling that could invalidate most gun control laws throughout the country. The court doesn't care about mass death.




The industry has a responsibility to platform all kinds of views—not just politically fashionable ones



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:




Nate Hagens’ recent interview of Professor Peter Ward, entitled “Oceans – What’s the Worst that Can Happen?”, serves as a good overview of mankind’s destruction of the marine biosphere and our road to extinction. The title is a rather rhetorical question because very bad things have happened, are already happening, and even worse things are unavoidable and on the horizon despite hopes that humans will run out of ways to extract the dirtiest and most inaccessible fossil fuel deposits. We have seen how inextricably linked economic growth is to rising fossil fuel consumption, no matter the mounting disasters happening before our eyes and the steady stream of dire warnings issued from the scientific community. The most current of such warnings came from the UN last month, and it states that escalating synergies between disasters, economic vulnerabilities and ecosystem failures are increasing the risk of a “global collapse” scenario. Such a catastrophic scenario appears all but inevitable. Constricting fossil fuel consumption is like squeezing a balloon. If one country stops consumption, another takes up the slack. .....

Unfortunately for us, humans have created an unsustainable civilization supporting billions of people while at the same time destroying the very foundation upon which that system is dependent. Humans are by far outperforming the carbon-spewing volcanoes of past mass extinctions. Nicholas Money, renowned mycologist and author of many books, recently wrote:

Decades ago, Gerald Durrell, the famous conservationist, recognized that “the human race is in the position of a man sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on.” Thirty years after Durrell’s death, the human population has increased by 2 billion and the damage has intensified. The branch will snap now whether we keep sawing or not.
The timeline for extinctions is not known, but, sooner or later, the disappearing mammals will be joined by the other groups of animals. Almost everything will be leaving the metaphorical ark, creeping down the gangplank into oblivion. Millions of other species, seen and unseen, including plants, seaweeds, and fungi will be leaving, too. The tiniest of organisms will inherit the planet, but great gulps of the microbial world will also disappear in the depths of this planetary holocaust…
..... Back to Peter Ward and that checklist for mass extinction…The second step after a large release of heat trapping gasses is that Earth’s poles will start warming up much faster than the rest of the globe, melting the polar icecaps and reducing the heat differential between the equator and higher latitudes. A recent study found that the Arctic is heating up as much as seven times faster than the global average. The Antarctic is warming four times faster than the global average. This diminishing heat differential between the higher latitudes and the equator leads to the third step which is that ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams slow down and become stagnant and swampish. ...

Despite the horrors described thus far, what really scares Professor Ward is sea level rise. Ward believes that the volcano of mankind will sputter out before we reach the levels required for a full-fledged Canfield Ocean, and negative feedback loops in the climate system will pull Earth back from the brink. The “Canfield Ocean”, a sulfidic and partially oxic ocean, existed for more than 40% of Earth history, between the Archean and Ediacaran periods. It would take millennia to reach that state again, but humans are supercharging the process to get there by releasing into the ocean vast quantities of nutrients from agricultural fertilizer, soil erosion, industrial waste and sewage, in addition to the ever-growing release of CO2 and methane emissions. Humans have become a geologic force breaching most if not all of the planetary boundaries that make Earth hospitable for life. The mechanisms required for Earth to return to a dead, toxic planet may have already been irreversibly set into motion. ...

Nate and Peter then get into the societal ignorance preventing humans from addressing any serious problem, let alone the existential threat of anthropogenic climate disruption. ...



....... According to Margulis (Lynn Margulis 2008), the unit of evolution is not the genome of individual organisms, but the “hologenome,” the ensemble of the genomes of the creatures that compose a holobiont. This concept is not without problems, in particular about what are the boundaries that define a specific holobiont, but it is gaining acceptance in the scientific community.

The present paper is a review of the concept of “holobiont” aimed at finding a unifying concept that could give us the key to understanding how and why many complex systems around us exist and operate. The “holobiont revolution” can help redress our views of the world and lead us to take a more collaborative attitude toward nature and our fellow humans. It is a way to change our current way of thinking and transform it into a gentler and more balanced view of the world, where we take what we need from Nature and give back to Nature what Nature needs. And the same concept holds for human life in human society.

......... Note also that, of course, a zebra that can't keep up with the herd will be the preferred target of predators. It is the removal of the unfit, a concept that was developed in particular by Gorshkov et al., (Gorshkov, Makarʹeva, and Gorshkov 2000) who put together a synthesis of how the ensemble of the living creatures on Earth (the biosphere) control the wider entity that we call the “ecosphere” generating the condition of dynamic stability we call “homeostasis.” This view was described in terms of the concept of “biotic regulation of the environment.” The biosphere, like any complex system, is subjected to an increase in disorder according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. But the law applies only to isolated systems. The biosphere is not one, and it can keep entropy growth in check using natural selection to maintain homeostasis. So, the biosphere does not normally aim at increasing the degree of fitness of individuals. The system strives for stability and the winners of the evolutionary game are those organisms that can best maintain it. So, the winners are always good holobionts!




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; 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:

Malone: The TruthLion Cometh
Testimony and emerging scientific data regarding the genetic inoculations

The data concerning SARS-CoV-2 genetic vaccine safety and effectiveness are coming in fast and furious. Time for a news roundup.


Chudov: Depopulation of Taiwan

This is a continuation of my post from yesterday about a massive 13% decline in births in Germany. Such a decline is a nine-sigma event, meaning that it is so unlikely to occur by chance, that it would naturally happen as rarely as an asteroid striking the Earth.

My article explored several more locales (UK, North Dakota, and Switzerland).

But no other place stands out as much as Taiwan does.

... When expressed in “sigmas”, units of standard deviation, the 23.24% drop in the birth rate in Taiwan is a 26-sigma event!


Must be the weather





You may be wondering these days if our country can get any crazier. The FDA and the CDC seem bent on killing and maiming as many Americans as possible. Proof (not just evidence, you understand) abounds that Pfizer and Moderna mRNA “vaccines” don’t work and are grossly unsafe. If the people who run these agencies don’t know that, then there has never been a lazier, less competent, worse-informed executive crew running anything in the history of Western Civ.

So, they press on now with shots for little children that are certain to harm the kids’ immune systems and produce an array of consequent serious disorders ranging from hepatitis to myocarditis to sterility to brain damage. You’d think that if mere rumors of these things reached their ears and eyeballs, these executives would at least pause their injection program to investigate. There is really no analog in history for authorities who act this blindly homicidal.

The Nazis murdered targeted groups for deliberate eugenic purposes, vicious as they were, and made it clear why they were doing it — at least among themselves — while they did it. Stalin killed his perceived political enemies and then killed masses randomly to hold the soviet populace in thrall to his rule. There’s a name for that: despotic cruelty. Mao Zedong revved up his murder campaigns and cultural revolutions to desperately hold on to his slip-sliding autocratic power. Pol Pot killed people who wore eyeglasses and read books because they were capable of figuring shit out — like, what Pol Pot was up to.

Dr. Anthony Fauci (White House Medical Advisor), Dr. Rochelle Walensky (CDC), and Dr. Robert M. Califf (FDA) are killing and harming Americans because… apparently, they don’t know why. As the old saw goes: they know not what they do. Or is that so? Is it even possible anymore? One must suppose it is possible if they are insane, which, you also understand, does not preclude them from being evil, too. 

Ms. Walensky says repeatedly that they are looking at or waiting on “the data.” No, she’s not. She’s just saying that, as if reciting a magic incantation that can deflect culpability. The data are in plain sight, not even hiding. The data are all over the world: this country, the UK, Denmark, France, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Portugal, Israel, Cuba, South Africa, Australia, name a country. The data are turning up now in respected medical journals, many news websites, substacks, and blogs, as well, even, here and there, in what we call mainstream media. A lot of the data until very recently were getting published in the agencies own collection organs, but they deliberately stopped it.

The data tell us that people who got “vaccinated” and “boosted” are turning up with broken immune systems that leave them extra-specially open to repeated Covid-19 re-infection, and that each reiteration of the illness breaks down their immune systems even more — which suggests that over time (think: the months ahead) more and more of them are going to die from all kinds of opportunistic viral and bacterial diseases, not to mention cancers, structural damage due to blood clots, heart tissue injury directly from spike proteins, and brain-and-neuro illness, ditto.

Do you believe that the authorities somehow missed all this?  Are they trying to pretend that they didn’t (take your pick): 1) fecklessly promote the biggest compound medical blunder in history? 2) conspire with pharma companies in a dastardly racketeering scheme? 3) carry out the orders of some shady, malevolent elite to cull the human population under a depraved, messianic, crypto-eco ideology? or 4) just…reasons….

There’s already plenty of data showing an abnormal rise of all-causes deaths in many countries. The life-insurance companies have been reporting it for months. But the acquired immunodeficiency of the “vaccinated” will become too tangible and visible as the network effect takes hold and evermore Americans realize that people are dying all around them, loved ones, friends, friends of friends, celebrities in the news. Inevitably that would produce some kind of social panic ...


Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Joomi: I will say that of the people I’ve met who became skeptical about the COVID-19 vaccines, a lot of them started out neutral and open-minded about them, and only later grew skeptical after seeing the propaganda, inconsistencies, and lies coming from the media and health officials. And in some cases, people who got vaccinated later changed their minds about them and regretted getting the vaccine; I fall into this camp. These people obviously did not start out biased against the vaccines.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

Cook: A lemming leading the lemmings: Slavoj Zizek and the terminal collapse of the anti-war left.

... Washington learned a hard lesson from the unpopularity of its 2003 attack on Iraq aimed at controlling more of the Middle East’s oil reserves. Ordinary people do not like seeing the public coffers ransacked or suffering years of austerity, simply to line the pockets of Blackwater, Halliburton, and Raytheon. And all the more so when such a war is sold to them on the basis of a huge deception.

So since then, the U.S. has been repackaging its neocolonialism via proxy wars that are a much easier sell. There have been a succession of them: Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela and now Ukraine. Each time, a few more leftists are lured into the camp of the war hawks by the West’s selfless, humanitarian instincts – promoted, of course, through the barrel of a Western-supplied arsenal. 

... The latest cheerleader for the military-industrial complex is Slavoj Zizek, the famed Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual whose work has gained him international prominence. His latest piece – published where else but The Guardian – is a morass of sloppy thinking, moral evasion and double speak. Which is why I think it is worth deconstructing. It encapsulates all the worst geostrategic misconceptions of Western intellectuals at the moment.

Zizek, who is supposedly an expert on ideology and propaganda, and has even written and starred in a couple of documentaries on the subject, seems now to be utterly blind to his own susceptibility to propaganda. 

.... Both Russia and the U.S. are wedded to the idea of their own “spheres of influence”. It is just that the U.S. sphere now encircles the globe through many hundreds of overseas military bases. By contrast, the West cries to the heavens when Russia secures a single military base in Crimea. ...


Chomsky believes that the main 'background' of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is "NATO expansion."

One of the reasons that Russian media has been completely blocked in the West, along with the unprecedented control and censorship over the Ukraine war narrative, is the fact that western governments simply do not want their public to know that the world is vastly changing.

Ignorance might be bliss, arguably in some situations, but not in this case. Here, ignorance can be catastrophic as western audiences are denied access to information about a critical situation that is affecting them in profound ways and will most certainly impact the world's geopolitics for generations to come.

...... While an alternative understanding of the devastating war in Ukraine is disallowed, the West continues to offer no serious answers or achievable goals, leaving Ukraine devastated and the root causes of the problem in place. "That's US policy," indeed.



The way in which commentators have looked upon the legal issues raised by Russia’s war in Ukraine is inadequate. Western leaders have focused exclusively on Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, both in 2014 and 2022. By territorial integrity is meant the principle that every state has a right to preserve itself in its own borders against external aggression. Undoubtedly, that is an important principle of international law. It is what makes the invasion or occupation of another state’s territory a categorically unjust act. This principle alone does not fully penetrate the legal issues, however, because its standing has to be assessed alongside other important principles in international law, especially the right of revolution and the right of national self-determination.

By choosing to view the Ukraine crisis solely through the lens of territorial integrity, Western policymakers systematically overlook one critical aspect of sovereignty. The principle of territorial integrity is only the external dimension of sovereignty—the more holistic concept. It is the application of international law to the external boundaries of states. But sovereignty also has an internal dimension: the right of a people to choose the sovereign whose authority they will abide by.


Zeusse: Biden forces Russia to retake all of Ukraine, and maybe even Lithuania

....... An excellent discussion of the ramifications of this situation can be found here, where the reasons why this pushes Russia, to retake all of Ukraine, plus to retake Lithuania, are well explained. Whether Putin will decide to do that, however, is not yet known. What is known is that if Russia is forced to either go to war against the U.S. and its allies, or else to continue to allow this international-law violation by Lithuania being backed-up by America, against Russia, then either Putin will back down and Biden will win, or else Biden will back down and Putin will win, or else we all will experience WW III no longer in just its proxy-war (Ukrainian battlefield) stage (such as has been the case), nor in any other merely traditional-war stage, but finally as an all-out nuclear exchange, which will be completed within less than an hour and doom everyone.

Biden has already decided to bring on a global recession or even depression in order to defeat Russia, but whether he will go all the way to WW III in order to force Russia to become just another ‘U.S. ally’ (but it would be the biggest one of all, since Russia is by far the world’’s biggest country, even without its former partners in the Soviet Union), isn’t yet known.

As Russia’s Government has said on many occasions, what is at stake for Russia in this matter is “existential,” namely whether or not Russia will continue to exist as a free nation, since it will not accept becoming yet another U.S. colony. However, for America, as America’s own Government has said on many occasions, what is at stake is continuation of U.S. hegemony over the world, or else there coming to be no hegemon. That fixed objective of the U.S. Government has been stated in many ways, but perhaps the clearest of all being by President Barack Obama on 28 May 2014, when addressing America’s future generals:
The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

Despite what some “defense analysts” may be telling Western media, the longer the war continues, the more Ukrainians will die and the weaker NATO will become.

......... In recognition of this reality, NATO Secretary General Jen Stoltenberg announced that Ukraine will more than likely have to make territorial concessions to Russia as part of any potential peace agreement, asking,

“what price are you willing to pay for peace? How much territory, how much independence, how much sovereignty…are you willing to sacrifice for peace?”

Stoltenberg, speaking in Finland, noted that similar territorial concessions made by Finland to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War was “one of the reasons Finland was able to come out of the Second World War as an independent sovereign nation.”

..... This is the ugly truth about Ukraine today — the longer the war continues, the more Ukrainians will die, and the weaker NATO will become. If left to people like Samus and Gressel, the result would be hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians, the destruction of Ukraine as a viable nation-state, and the gutting of NATO’s front-line combat capability, all sacrificed without meaningfully altering the inevitability of a strategic Russian victory.

... Hopefully sanity will prevail, and the West will wean Ukraine off the addiction of heavy weaponry, and push it to accept a peace settlement which, although bitter to the taste, will leave something of Ukraine for future generations to rebuild.

.... It is sad that Western leaders are destroying with their own hands the underpinnings of democracy at home through this censorship.





The pretensions of the establishment media took a severe battering this month as the defamation trial of Guardian columnist Carole Cadwalladr reached its conclusion and the hacked emails of Paul Mason, a long-time stalwart of the BBC, Channel 4 and the Guardian, were published online.

Both of these celebrated journalists have found themselves outed as recruits – in their differing ways – to a covert information war being waged by Western intelligence agencies. ...

.... The revelation that the CIA and US special forces are conducting military operations in Ukraine does indeed make a lie of the Biden administration’s insistence at the start of the war that there would be no American boots on the ground in Ukraine, and the admission that NATO powers are so involved in operations against a nuclear superpower means we are closer to seeing a nuclear exchange than anyone should be comfortable with.

... The other day Antiwar’s Daniel Larison tweeted, “Hawks in April: Don’t call it a proxy war! Hawks in May: Of course it’s a proxy war! Hawks in June: It’s not their war, it’s our war!”

... So the previously unthinkable idea that the US is at war with Russia has been gradually normalized, with the heat turned up so slowly that the frog doesn’t notice it’s being boiled alive. If that idea can be sufficiently normalized, public consent for greater escalations will likely be forthcoming, even if those escalations are extremely psychotic.

“China is a strange, backwards nation ruled by tyrants,” said the nation founded by Puritans who used to execute women for witchcraft and just killed reproductive rights protections because they think Jesus told them to.

The world is dominated culturally, economically and militarily by a regime that just killed women’s rights protections because they make Jesus mad.

❖

As long as the powerful can make the public fight over issues which don’t inconvenience power, public attention can be kept away from issues which do inconvenience power.

❖

The US empire is going to destroy economies, starve people by the millions, start wars, and wage increasingly risky nuclear brinkmanship in its campaign to subvert Russia and China and secure unipolar planetary domination, but we need the US-led world order to maintain the peace.

❖

Humanity’s newfound ability to share information and ideas hasn’t made everything better largely because humanity as a collective remains as disordered and delusional as the average individual human. Our new hive mind is still a higher order of mind, but it’s not yet healthy.

We’ve got access to way more information, but we’ve also got access to way more disfunction. We’re not necessarily better or worse now, we’re just way more interconnected.

But what our interconnectedness may end up doing is speed up the process of becoming a conscious species. Online you can find any depth of human suffering that suits your fancy, but you can also find information about what’s going on in the world that doesn’t come through the authorized channels, you can find revolutionary ideas, and you can find information on healing and awakening. What that may end up meaning is that we can all make all our mistakes and successes in a much shorter time span, because we’re not just plugged into our own successes and failures but everyone else’s as well.

We’re still collectively dysfunctional, but maybe now we can get healthier faster.

❖

Really humanity’s just going to have to wake up. That’s it. We’re going to have to drastically change our relationship with mental narrative, bring consciousness to our inner processes, and heal our trauma.

We’ll never incrementalism or crypto or technological innovation or revolution our way around the basic need for a profound transformation of consciousness. We can talk all we want about proletariat uprisings, Bitcoin, direct action or whatever, but ultimately we’ll never see the revolutionary changes we need as long as we’re locked in delusion. We’ll keep generating the same self-destructive patterning until we change how we think.

Luckily the populations most sorely in need of awakening are the ones with the most luxury of time and energy to make it happen. The wealthiest populations in the wealthiest parts of the world are by far the most destructive, and so they can afford to do a lot of inner work.

Things are fucked because we’re ruled by tyrants. We’ll be ruled by tyrants until we collectively force real change. We don’t force real change because we are propagandized. We’ll remain propagandized until we awaken from our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative.

Maybe that awakening will be triggered by things getting a lot worse. Maybe it will happen as a result of our continually expanding awareness. Maybe it will happen spontaneously. Or maybe it won’t happen at all. I don’t know. I just know that’s what our plight hinges on.



All of our world’s worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don’t use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.

Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world. ...

The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in approximately five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism. Like the fingers on a hand they are distinct from each other and each play their own role, but they’re all part of the same thing and work together toward the same goal. They’re all just different aspects of the US-centralized empire’s narrative control system. ...



Other Fare:

Instead of fuming, maybe Democrats should be contrite about the unearned advantage they got from Roe v. Wade

Maybe it’s time everyone slowed down and looked at Roe for what it was. 

It was legal malpractice of the highest order that disenfranchised hundreds of millions of Americans by rationalizing that the Constitution had settled the question of abortion. 

An issue that rightly belonged in state legislatures where citizens could argue for and against was commandeered by the Blackmun court and settled. This is not merely a conservative view. 

Since Roe became law in 1973, a powerful consensus has been building among legal authorities left and right that Roe was constructed not on the breakwater of constitutional logic but on the seafoam of judicial activism. 

Here’s just a brief sampling from the left. And understand, I could easily add 20 more examples just like these:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Supreme Court Justice): “The political process was moving in the early 1970 …not swiftly enough for advocates for quick, complete change, but majoritarian institutions were listening and acting. (Roe’s) heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.” 

Edward Lazarus (attorney, clerk to Roe-author Justice Harry Blackmun): “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather. …(Roe) has little connection to the constitutional right it purportedly interpreted.” ....

... American liberals have lived rent free for 50 years on the Blackmun decision. They didn't have to frame arguments. They didn't have to persuade 50 legislatures. The Blackmun court handed them the ball, the game and the whistle when it was only just beginning. 

Today's court is restarting the game where it always belonged -- in the legislatures. But you can't restart this game. Roe has been law for five decades, long enough for Americans to grow accustomed to legalized abortion. Roe was an enormous head start for the left. ..
 


..... Ginsburg herself criticized the opinion as going too far. At The University of Chicago Law School, Ginsburg stated on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade that Roe gave
“the opponents of access to abortion … a target to aim at relentlessly and attributed not to the democratic process, but to nine unelected old men.” She added that “the history of the year since then is that the momentum, momentum has been on the other side. The cases that we get now on abortion are all about restrictions on access to abortion and not about expanding the rights of women.”
On “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” in 2019, Ginsburg noted:
“The court had an easy target because the Texas law was the most extreme in the nation,” she maintained. Ginsburg explained that based on the Texas law at the center of Roe v. Wade, “abortion could be had only if necessary to save the woman’s life” with no exceptions for rape or incest.

I thought that Roe v. Wade was an easy case and the Supreme Court could have held that most extreme law unconstitutional and put down its pen,” she added. “Instead, the court wrote an opinion that made every abortion restriction in the country illegal in one fell swoop and that was not the way that the court ordinarily operates.”
Finkenauer’s insistence that pro-life advocates could not utter the name of Ginsburg did not apply to pro-choice advocates, even those who blame the late justice for the Roe reversal. I wrote during Ginsburg’s service that she was taking a huge risk by declining to retire to guarantee that her seat would be filled by someone appointed by a Democratic president. I specifically noted that Roe could be reversed and her legacy lost due to a desire to remain on the Court for a couple more years. I was criticized for that column. However, now liberals are raising that decision and blaming Ginsburg for Dobbs.

Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg tweeted “the terrible irony is that her decision to stay too long at the party helped lead to the destruction of one of the things she cared about the most. Sadly, this will be a big part of her legacy. ..


if you truly care about this issue, well worth a read in full...
*** Wolf: On Losing "Roe"
How Could this Possibly have Happened? Easy. American Women Grew Up.

... I am going to argue that the defeat of Roe is not in fact a defeat of women but a necessary evolution in the law, in response to women’s ascendancy in America over the last fifty years.

Before I do, though, I warn that the Roe decision is being used as a pretext for a campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court. This anti-SCOTUS campaign fits in as part of the larger war on our democratic institutions

.... is Dobbs really a “tragic mistake”?

Is it indeed, as liberal feminist narratives have held for five decades, an outcome of pro-life interests’ attacks on the nation’s women as a whole, by sadistic, misogynist, paternalistic old white men?

Or does the end of Roe represent something very different?

I believe that the Dobbs decision was well and even compassionately thought out by at least several Justices. I believe that it is also a reaction to devastating overreach by the organized pro-choice movement, especially in the last twenty years.

Finally, I believe that it represents not a defeat of women, but rather that it is a testament to the reality of the evolution of women's growing authority and power in this country.

Let me explain....

... 
Today, woman — a woman — posted to me on Gettr: “I have always been on [board] with 1st trimester abortions. But when they started pushing for late terms abortions I could no longer go along with that. So if I am forced to choose full term abortions or no abortions, I am going to side with no abortions. The left just had to keep pushing and that is where I draw the line. I am hoping that we can come together and dial back the insanity.”

I agree with this Everywoman. But organized feminist pro-choice activists increasingly, over the past fifty years, ignored those millions who shared this woman’s common sense and reasoned position, and did so to their own destruction.

Pro-choice activists were not content to defend the right to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester, which are the limits on readily available abortion throughout Western Europe (where, notably, there is almost no anti-choice activism).

The organized feminist left — my former people - were not content to use the language or policies that polls supported, of seeking a country in which abortion would be “safe, legal and rare.”

Rather, they pushed, in state after state, to enshrine that “right” up until very the day of a baby’s birth.

At what point does a “right” become a murder? ...

... Today, while we still need to close many gaps in gender equality, the world is very different. That’s what some of the Justices’ more well-reasoned and thoughtful decisions to overturn Roe, rightly evaluate.

An American woman does have choices and powers she did not have in 1973. A pregnant woman does have choices and powers she did not have in 1973. She can buy contraceptives. Birth control pills are now over 99% effective in preventing pregnancy. IUDs are over 99% effective at preventing pregnancy for seven years. A woman or her partner can buy condoms anywhere, without secrecy or guilt in most communities. A package of 12 condoms costs $7.98. Information about contraception is easy to find. Single mothers, unmarried mothers, are no longer ostracized in most communities. Teen mothers are no longer typically exiled from their communities in 2022, as they were in 1973. Women in America in 2022 have access to professions, credit, degrees.

That does not mean that an unintended pregnancy is ever easy — but it does mean that the circumstances that made Roe seem obviously needed, have changed;...



.... The next time Republicans have the Senate, House and Presidency they’ll pass a nationwide abortion ban.

Meanwhile restrictions on guns will be increasingly struck down. Cops no longer have to read people their Miranda rights. Republicans want gay marriage gone. I think they’ll continue to allow cross-race marriages, at least as long as Thomas is on the court, and maybe longer, since they need Hispanic votes. Free public schooling is also likely to go in many states.

America, fuck’yeah.



University of Alberta Assistant Professor Dougal MacDonald raised hell on November 20, 2019 by writing in a personal Facebook post that the 1932-33 genocide of Ukrainians referred to as Holodomor was a “myth fabricated by Hitlerites”.

If such remarks were made in most nations today, it wouldn’t be such a big deal (as only 16 nations have chosen to recognize this event as an act of genocide rather than the tragic act of nature which MacDonald and countless eminent scholars maintain.)

Canada is not however “most nations”, but has rather had the misfortune of hosting some of the most virulent groups of rabid ultra-right wing Ukrainian fascists who were transplanted into the Prairies and west coast by Anglo-American intelligence networks in the wake of WWII.

Today, many of these 2nd and 3rd generation Banderites control powerful institutions like the Ukrainian Congress of Canada (UCC) and have bred such confused and dangerous ideologues as Canada’s own Deputy Prime Minister (and leading Rhodes Scholar) Chrystia Freeland who sees no shame in her grandfather’s leading role as a Nazi collaborator in WW2 or in holding up right wing flags associated with the fascist Organization for Ukrainian Nationalists at a recent rally in Toronto.

.... The British Hand Behind Holodomor (and Nazism)

For those who are not aware, the two figures most responsible for the “on the ground evidence” of Holodomor were two journalists named Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge. By looking at these two figures, we should not be surprised to find ourselves bumping into the highest echelons of a British think tank named the Round Table, which acted as the guiding hand behind the rise of Nazism.

Both Jones and Muggeridge were deployed to Ukraine for several weeks in 1933 and their reports of controlled famine were the primary kindling for the anti-Russian fires which fueled the rise of Nazism which British Imperialists then hoped would lead to a German-Russian war of annihilation.



Quotes of the Week:

Macgregor: We are funding the Ukrainian government, if we stop funding everything would collapse, Mr Zelensky would climb on an airplane where he owns a mansion.

Ilargi: And we now know that they won’t be BRICS for much longer. Many countries choose to be affiliated, in one form or another, with the BRICS rather than the “west”. They see that Russia is winning in Ukraine, and they see the damage the sanctions do. It’s just practical considerations. Saudi Arabia and Argentina are interested in joining BRICS. So are Uruguay, Iran, Egypt, Thailand, and a number of post-Soviet States. They see where the real economic power resides.






Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


I’ve had the privilege to be mentored by some of the most talented physicians in the United States. I’ve long sought to understand what common traits allowed them to become miracle workers, and in my assessment, an upstanding commitment to ethical conduct in their medical practice and professional life. Unfortunately, minimal effort is devoted to teaching ethics within the medical curriculum and the ethical framework young doctors are left with leaves much to be desired.

For my entire life, I believed that Roe vs. Wade would never be overturned as too many things were predicated upon it remaining in place. At the same time, we live in an unusual era that is characterized by rapid change and things people never thought possible suddenly emerging.

There are a variety of explanations for why this is happening (my best guess is it is part of a cosmological cycle) and within many spiritual systems, these types of times are viewed as inherently dangerous because most human beings cannot thrive within rapid change. Those esoteric systems in turn believe the human experience is the process of having a stable center or core which is continually influenced by your external circumstances, and that each individual’s life is a product of the internal stability they can maintain.

This principle is also embodied within ethics and morality. In times of great uncertainty like the ones we live in, it is critically important to have a strong ethical core.

...... When morality and ethics are approached from a legalistic standpoint, dilemmas similar to those found with law arise, except unlike the law there are no real legal penalties for failing to abide by the ethical principles. Put differently, in this form of ethics the focus is typically on “How can I bend the rules to get what I want?“ rather than “What is the right thing to do?”

 The inherent instability of our era has exposed how prevalent this form of ethics is as the political spectrum continually pressures members of society to take absurd positions that are difficult to defend and inconsistent with each other. In many cases, a debate on the ethics of a politicized issue is impossible because individuals are so emotionally invested in their position the morality or truth of their position is not a primary concern.

One of the best ways I have found to summarize this is that unless someone is willing to suffer to abide by their ethical principles, their specific ethics are relatively meaningless, and are simply being chosen for convenience. ...



Pics of the Week:










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