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Monday, June 6, 2022

2022-06-06

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

Economic and Market Fare:


Yves here. Yet another interview with Michael Hudson, centering on his new book, The Destiny of Civilization. Here, he focuses on the intensifying competition between the finance-led US and its economic allies in the West versus the manufacturing/real economy powerhouses of China and Russia. As the importance of propaganda in the Ukraine conflict demonstrates, the ideological war is as hard fought as the material one.


Pippa Malmgren: Glocalization

The world economy was driven by globalization ever since China and India and other emerging markets truly entered the world economy. Billions of new workers from these emerging markets pushed wages and costs down and pushed global productivity up. While this flow of jobs and wealth did not serve everyone equally, it created a world where everyone believed in the possibility that they would get rich before they got old. The belief was that the future would definitely be better. Growth could be relied upon to improve. Times have changed. Now people think globalization is slowing or stopping when in fact it is accelerating and deepening. Instead of planning for globalization that is broader and deeper, people are wrongly planning for its demise. This slowing down process has been called “slowbalization”. But, it’s just a transition period to globalization that is bringing local production and global networks together. Globalization is not dead. It’s on steroids. It’s Glocalization, which means the re-introduction of local production everywhere interlinked with global supply chains and global communications. It’s global & local. 

Everybody seems to have a different definition of globalization. The old definition of globalization was that all the jobs and production went to emerging markets, especially China and all the cheap goods went to the West. The new glocalization is a world where all the jobs and production are going everywhere and all the cheap and sophisticated goods are going everywhere. The old globalization flows were driven by the cheapness of labor. The new glocalization flows are driven by the sophistication of manufacturers and of consumers. Emerging market consumers are ever more discerning and leapfrogging into growth. Africa and Asia skipped past old-fashioned telecoms into a world where smartphones drive connectivity, not old-fashioned exchanges. China is no longer the cheapest place to make things now that inflation has a foothold there. Alabama and Africa are now pretty competitive places to make things. The world has dramatically changed as we’ve shifted from globalization to glocalization. ...

... By 2013, China realized that the perfect circle was broken. Instead of buying US Treasuries and G7 bonds, they reoriented their capital into a grand strategy to build a global infrastructure that would support demand for Chinese goods. This was the Belt and Road Initiative, which involves building the ports, bridges, roads, and digital infrastructure that connect China to the world. China’s excess supply could now be sold to Africa, Asia, and elsewhere while supplies of critical assets like food and raw materials could be negotiated in exchange for building ports and roads. China’s trillion-dollar pool of US and Western bonds remained in place, though China bought fewer and fewer US financial assets over time. China’s new business partners bought more and more as they borrowed US Dollars to pay for the roads and bridges China so kindly agreed to build for such a low price. Japan quietly picked up the slack too, increasing its ownership of US bonds. American and European pension plans also bought more Treasuries because they were desperately underfunded and government bonds are always “safe” right?

... So, now we decry the end of globalization. But something new and better is replacing it. Glocalization. The re-localization of suppliers and supply chains all over the world. Now everything is being produced everywhere. Yes, this means more redundancy but it also implies more competition and more specialization.

... This isn’t de-globalization. It’s globalization on steroids. The transition is awkward and slow. But, it’s happening.




General Theories

In 2022, the audience for books about John Maynard Keynes is probably as large as it has ever been. With two global economic crises followed by widespread use of government interventions, debates recently relegated to history books and academic journals have acquired new urgency. The curious reader can pick from a wealth of recent books. Geoff Mann’s In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution (2017) and heterodox economist James Crotty’s Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism (2019) offer perspectives from critical political economy, while Zach Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (2020) presents a detailed biography. But until now, there has been nothing quite like Stephen Marglin’s Raising Keynes, which subtly promises no less than A Twenty-first Century General Theory. The text runs to more than 896 pages, weighs four pounds in hardcover, and, as Marglin acknowledges, is not an easy read. But the result is truly original.

Marglin is uniquely positioned to carry forward the trajectory of the Keynesian tradition. Like Keynes, Marglin’s early career saw him transform from the star pupil of the reigning economic theories of his training—neoclassical economics—into a sort of a radical economist of his own category after receiving tenure. And, like Keynes, Marglin argues that it was his observation of the world around him that forced him to shed his allegiance to neoclassical theories and their claim to represent how the world works.



We must bridge growing divides and rewire multilateralism to serve both collective and national interests more effectively

The pandemic, war in Ukraine, the threat to food security, and the resurgence of global poverty. Heatwaves, droughts, and other extreme weather events. These are not random shocks. Nor are they a perfect storm in the conventional sense, a one-off conjuncture of bad events. We face instead a confluence of lasting structural insecurities—geopolitical, economic, and existential—each reinforcing the other. We have entered a perfect long storm.

.... Second, we face the prospect of stagflation, with higher inflation and stalled growth for a period of time. What was seen by many as an improbable “tail risk” a year ago is now a likely scenario. Advanced economies’ central banks have a more complex task than any time in living memory, and their chances of taming inflation while achieving a soft landing in economic growth are getting slimmer. 

..... Third, the existential commons are deteriorating at an accelerating pace. Climate change, shrinking biodiversity, water scarcity, polluted oceans, a dangerously congested outer space, and the spread of infectious diseases will pose growing threats to life and livelihoods everywhere. We must address these threats in parallel because the science is clear on how they interact.



Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.




Charts: 
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Bubble Fare:

2022: Year of Living Dangerously

... In this post I was planning on assessing the bull case vs. the bear case. However, there is no real bull case to consider on a long-term basis. Since the lows of 2008 we've been told that "extreme valuations don't matter" because interest rates were at generational lows. That argument is no longer true. Today, over the course of this summer, investors will face the most extreme Fed tightening in history. Which means that now, record valuations DO matter. In addition of course, most of today's pundits happily ignore the ongoing Tech implosion and RECORD housing bubble. The only two bearish pundits who capture the magnitude of today's risks are Michael Burry and Jeremy Grantham.

... Burry's view seems to be that consumers are raiding their savings accounts to weather inflation in food, energy and housing costs, and a recession is likely once those cash reserves are exhausted

...... Let's take a look at the "bull case", so I can demolish it.  ...

... The S&P volume oscillator confirms what breadth is saying - this market is NOT oversold. 

I will become bullish when this indicator becomes oversold indicating capitulation AND when the Fed has capitulated and stops raising rates.

That combined scenario is limit down away.

.... Grantham predicts the market has 40% downside below this level. I predict that the market will shut down below this level.


25 reasons why traditional finance is wrong.

....... Today I am publishing my rebuttal. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Inefficient Market Hypothesis: 25 Instances That Prove Samuelson and Fama Wrong.

CAPM, meet CAP MEME.

........


(not just) for the ESG crowd:

BIS: Gabriel Makhlouf: Climate change – avoiding the “Do I Feel Lucky?” school of policymaking (PDF) 



The famous snow-capped peaks of the Alps are fading fast and being replaced by vegetation cover - a process called "greening" that is expected to accelerate climate change, a study said Thursday


Our writer drove from New Orleans to Chicago and back to test the feasibility of taking a road trip in an EV. She wouldn’t soon do it again.



Other Fare:

Talk of a four-day week in the UK has accelerated since the COVID pandemic, though Labour did pledge to introduce it within a decade had Jeremy Corbyn led the party to victory in the 2019 general election.







Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Top Gun: Maverick Is Another Military Recruitment Video Disguised as a Movie


Petroleum Wars in the Age of Climate Disaster: a Bridge Fuel Too Far


Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism.

........... John Oliver likened the practice of hiring corporate executives and lobbyists to oversee their former employers to “hiring a dingo to babysit for you.”

That’s a good, colorful, memorable phrase, but long before “dingo babysitters,” corruption-fighters used the “revolving door” as a metaphor for the practice of executives cycling from industry to regulatory agencies and back again.

..... That’s regulatory capture. A monopolistic industry, so concentrated that it can rob us blind and then agree on how to spend the booty to suborn a weak regulator.

....... Public choice theory is a form of regulatory nihilism. It insists that it is impossible for public agencies to reliably uphold the private interest — and counsels us to let the market discipline companies whose self-interest might bring us all to harm.

That’s true…so long as you ignore all of human history.

...... The problem isn’t that regulators are too strong, it’s that corporations are too strong.

Regulators have to be stronger than the companies they oversee. Obviously. Obviously! To get good regulation, we have to starve the (corporate) beast. 

... We live in an oligarchy. Lawmakers neglect policies with overwhelming public support, and enact policies with corporate support, even when the public overwhelmingly objects. 

... For regulators and lawmakers to make good policy, they need good information and good incentives. Both of those require weak corporate power.


Capitalism rests on a network of privately-owned infrastructure, with shipping at its heart – but now the industry is in chaos as the profiteering of rentier corporations sends the world system into meltdown.


Kunstler: Your Show of Shows

The unravelling of the USA gets its summer steroid booster shot this Thursday when the political twerk-fest known as the January 6th Select Committee commences prime-time televising of its inquiry into the so-called “insurrection” the day that Congress met to tally the 2020 electoral college vote when hundreds of protesters entered the US Capitol illegally, egged on and enabled by a squad of FBI plants larded through the crowd, and by shadowy figures inside the building who unlocked the doors for them.

The objectives of this extravaganza are A) to soften up the remaining “purple” voters before the midterm election, B) to paint former president Donald Trump as an instigator of the uproar and an enemy-of-the-people so he won’t be able to run for office again, and C) to punish former White House employees and Trump partisans with onerous legal fees so as to knock them off the political game board.

The Party of Chaos certainly doesn’t need to reinforce the mass formation psychosis of its base who maintain that the 2020 election was the fairest-and-squarest in US history. The committee members will chant the talismanic phrase “The Big Lie” ad nauseam to ward off reasonable suspicions that they are the ones doing the lying. Since a kind of maniacal stupidity attends all the party’s doings these days, it could easily backfire on them. Even two years later probes are still pending in several swing states, and only a few weeks ago, the documentary 2000 Mules released time-stamped videocam footage of blatant wholesale drop-box ballot-stuffing around the country.


The Two Party Hypocrisy Over The Right To Choose

In early May, Politico dropped a bombshell of a news story on the U.S. populace with the publication of a leaked draft decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Written by the freakishly conservative Justice Samuel Alito, this decision would effectively strike down with a vengeance the historic Roe v. Wade ruling that has protected and codified a woman’s right to choose since 1973. Naturally, this leak has enflamed all sides of the political spectrum in this country and further exposed the ugly hypocrisy that rules our two political parties.

On one side you have the Democratic Party whose leaders and influencers, when faced with Politico’s revelations, chose to simply tell their base to just vote harder in this years upcoming mid-term elections. Yes, after years of broken campaign promises to protect and enshrine Roe v. Wade as the law of the land, the Grand Poobah’s of the Democratic Party appear to be turning to the worn out copy of their climate change playbook of inaction. Choosing to just sit on their hands and campaign rather than go through the actual work of rallying their majority in Congress and utilizing the power of their Presidency to try and put a stop to this impending disaster. ...

... If you substitute the words “COVID” and “Vaccine” with “Pregnancy Termination” or “Abortion” in the above statement, you’d have a very sound and thoughtful argument for the protection of bodily autonomy and the individual rights of women. I guess Republicans only want to protect bodily autonomy from overreaching government when it suits them. ...

... No, these laws are about the control and subjugation of women and, as I mentioned before, the Republican Party’s fealty to the voting block of the Religious Right. They want votes, just like the Democrats, and to hell with your suffering and rights. Remember, with these two political parties it’s always, ALWAYS, going to come back to maintaining their political power.


Related Tweet:

Related Vid:




Unsustainability Fare:

Radagast: The End of the Humanflood

If you look at the past 200 years, there are two kinds of animals that have done well from a Darwinian perspective. On the one hand there are those classified as humans, on the other hand there are those that are born and raised for the purpose of keeping human beings fed. Almost every other animal that walks this Earth is being pushed into extinction. ......

... There was once a golden age, when our planet was covered in megafauna. Armadillo-like animals the size of small cars, mammoths, lemurs the size of gorillas, giant ground sloths that dug enormous tunnels you could ride your bicycle through, cave lions, the giant animals that once thrived are too numerous to mention.

Today almost all the large animals that survive live in Africa, for a reason: This is where primates first began to walk upright and use tools, before spreading out of Africa. Here nature had a very long time, to develop an arsenal with which to keep our species under control. Its favored weapon became malaria. Half of all humans who have ever lived, have died of malaria. With humans in sub-Saharan Africa kept in check, the megafauna could survive our hunger.

... And so we have to ask ourselves, considering there is no desire to make a global transition and considering that those people who don’t reproduce will simply be replaced by those who have no interest in sparing the natural world, how are we going to solve the crisis? How will we enable the non-human species to recover, before they are forever lost? ....



When I look at the historic photo of this group of five young passionate and enthusiastic scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1), I feel from their attitude the same eagerness and determination that I see in the eyes of my children who are around their same age today. In 1972, these five fellows truly expected that their report on “The Limits to Growth” would trigger a change in the development of humanity and motivate global leaders to act in protecting future generations. Their dream was cut short. Although the book became very popular around the planet with more than 30 millions readers, it was largely criticized by politicians and renown economists. The effort to bury this scientific work turned out to be so successful that the discredit lasted for more than thirty years. But the debate is still not over! In June 2022, we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Meadows Report, which is finally considered as the most influential environmental book and a major publication from the twentieth century. ...

............. There are a few principles that are guiding these results. I will highlight only a couple of them that I appreciated very much.

First principle, the “Tragedy of the Commons”, from Garrett Hardin (1968). This is a very simple problem that we can experiment in our everyday life. It goes against the principles of the neoclassical economists who consider that the pursuit of our self-interest will lead to the maximum common good. Hardin said “No”, as it leads more to the destruction of the resource being exploited

.... Second principle, our difficulty to apprehend the effect of an exponential phenomenon. We are used to figuring out the impact of linear growth, so we have enough time to react and take appropriate countermeasures. However, we are completely blind towards the tsunami impact of an exponential growth. Out of the few examples taken in the Meadows report illustrating the dangerous consequences of this inability, I like the one of the lily pond

... Third principle, an important element of complexity that we have a hard time  anticipating, is the feedback effect which can amplify or dampen any perturbation.

........... Fortunately, this is not the end of the tale.

In recent years, the indisputable recognition of the climate crisis gave to the report a new lease of life. Numerous studies have been published showing the accuracy of the trends estimated initially by the Meadows team (i.e., Matthew Simmons, Graham M. Turner, Charles A. S. Hall & John W. Day, Gaya Herrington...), and confirmed that ironically the basic scenario (Scenario 1 “Business-as-usual”) is aligned with current trends in all the key factors applied in the system dynamics model.



.......... Although we like to pretend that the technology which surrounds us is novel and world-changing, as physicist Tom Murphy has shown, much of it would be recognisable to someone in the USA of the 1950s:
“Look around your environment and imagine your life as seen through the eyes of a mid-century dweller. What’s new? Most things our eyes land on will be pretty well understood. The big differences are cell phones (which they will understand to be a sort of telephone, albeit with no cord and capable of sending telegram-like communications, but still figuring that it works via radio waves rather than magic), computers (which they will see as interactive televisions), and GPS navigation (okay: that one’s thought to be magic even by today’s folk). They will no doubt be impressed with miniaturization as an evolutionary spectacle, but will tend to have a context for the functional capabilities of our gizmos.

“Telling ourselves that the pace of technological transformation is ever-increasing is just a fun story we like to believe is true. For many of us, I suspect, our whole world order is built on this premise.”
The point is that most of these technologies have already reaped the cheap and easy, and, indeed, almost all of the hard and expensive improvements that are ever going to be made.  In this respect, we are entering a period similar to the early twentieth century when we hit the limits to coal-powered technologies.  The big difference today being that there is no even more energy-dense and easily available new energy source available to us to usher in a new suite of technologies in the way that oil-based technologies rapidly replaced coal in the years after World War Two.

From this viewpoint, the smart thing to do today would be to simplify our way of life – and write-off a large part of the monetary claims on future exergy growth which will not be arriving – in order to bring our economies into line with the declining surplus energy available to us.  The paradox though, is that – even at today’s higher prices – energy does not appear to be the biggest problem before us.  For all of the complaints about the rapid and steep rise in fuel and electricity prices, they remain low in comparison to the benefits that we derive from them ...

... Several decades ago, sociologist Joseph Tainter observed that collapsing civilisations have a habit of unconsciously entering into complexity traps, adding energy-intensive complexity in a desperate attempt to sustain themselves.  Our turn to energy-intensive automation in an attempt to overcome our growing woes and to maintain economic growth is likely repeating the same folly.  The difference – at least for those who see the economy as primarily an energy rather than a monetary system – is that we have the necessary knowledge to avoid our complexity trap if only we are prepared to actively simplify away from an economy based on mass consumption in favour of one based around material simplicity…  I’m not holding my breath though.



It’s official: the world is committed to rapidly reducing CO2 emissions. Just look at the the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, or President Biden’s April 22, 2021 press release, or California’s SB 100 climate act, or New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or Germany’s Energiewende, or the UK’s Net Zero pledge, or any of many other such pledges.

And essentially all of woke corporate America is on board with the program. Consider the tidal wave of so-called “ESG” investing, focused on re-organizing corporate activities to reduce carbon emissions. Super-woke banking giant JP Morgan is leading the charge. From a recent JP Morgan press release:

... And yet, somehow it just doesn’t seem to be happening.




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

.... Due to these events, I was requested to write an article on why the COVID vaccines were unlikely to be effective.  With pharmaceutical products, I prefer to focus on their dangers rather than their ineffectiveness because being ineffective is typically less impactful than being toxic. This is a common thought process and has held true with discussions on the COVID vaccinations, where questions of their safety are discussed more often than questions of their efficacy. I believe shortcomings in their efficacy is critically important to discuss for two reasons:
  • The basis for the mandates is predicated upon the vaccines being effective, particularly in the prevention of infection, and most importantly transmission.
  • The refusal to consider other means for addressing the pandemic were based upon “increasing vaccination uptake“ being the best approach or addressing the pandemic.
..................


A familiar tale of a virus that was deadly for the already moribund tackled with a "vaccine" that kills the healthy


The chart above speaks for itself but allow me give you my interpretation:
  1. In the run up to COVID, Ireland had already experienced a mortality event that accounted for around 1,000 excess deaths. I used 600 weekly deaths as baseline so perhaps this was just a normal seasonal mortality event?
  2. During the period of official COVID epidemic between 14-Mar-20 and 02-May-20, there were 1,173 excess deaths, so a little more than the immediately prior event.
  3. However, by 19-Sept-20 every single one of those excess deaths has been accounted for, as the series returns to 1,000. In other words, every single excess COVID death was of a moribund person, someone who was going to die within 6 months anyway.
  4. COVID returns on 19-Dec-20 (as you would fully expect a seasonal respiratory pathogen to do), this time accounting for 2,138 deaths, almost twice as many as the spring epidemic. It is unclear how many people would have succumbed to the virus in the absence of the “vaccine” because mass vaccination started just one week later. What is clear though, is that vaccinating in the middle of an epidemic is not a good thing to do (you don’t need to be an epidemiologist, vaccinologist or a virologist to know this if you have read any relevant scientific literature).
  5. Unlike the spring 2020 epidemic, cumulative excess deaths after the winter resurgence do not return to baseline. So, either the deaths this time are of people who were not so moribund and/or something perpetuates the death, i.e. creates a new susceptible population. Again, if you have read the scientific literature, you will understand exactly how the mRNA injections will do this.
  6. As if winter 2020/21 was bad enough, come autumn 2021 (11-Sep to be exact), with 92% of the adult population injected at least once, excess deaths accumulate steadily, attaining a whopping 2,837 by the end of March 2022, almost two and a half times the spring 2020 death toll. It’s difficult to know exactly what causes this - probably a combination of collateral deaths due to the crazy COVID interventions deny healthcare and increasing societal level stress, immune systems destroyed by the “vaccine”, and the adverse effects of the “vaccine” itself, but for sure, the “cure” is a whole lot worse than the original disease and doesn’t look like it’s going to be over any time soon.




Summary: The BA4/5 sister variants currently dominate two countries: South Africa and Portugal. South Africa is barely vaccinated (only 35% had a vaccine, 5% had a booster), whereas Portugal is 95% vaccinated and 70% boosted. The situations in these countries could not be any more different: while Ba.4 and Ba.5 were mere blips on the radar in South Africa, these same variants are driving a deadly wave of Covid in highly-vaccinated Portugal, with deaths among the Portuguese nearing January peak and showing few signs of abating.

South Africa and Portugal form a two-country controlled experiment: vaccinate one country and do not vaccinate another, and expose both to Covid Ba4/5. The difference in outcomes is telling.

............... Why are reinfections happening? Because boosted people are unable to acquire proper immunity upon infection. Thus, they are forced to endure endless Covid reinfections, that further damage their immune systems, inviting more illness.


Study based on data from emergency services. COVID infection itself not linked to significant increase in cardiovascular complications.



....... ES wins a grappling match by clean submission by showing that (still working at the U.S. county level) COVID deaths correlate to vaccination no more and no less after vaccination began as before. The pattern of results just…remains the same. This supports both,
  1. Crawford's Zero Efficacy Hypothesis, and
  2. My belief that the apparent mild efficacy is due to wealth and education biases.
........... And again, this is what you would expect if there were zero true vaccine efficacy, and that all signals of efficacy were simply signals that wealth allows the purchase of health.

Once we identify household income as a confounder, we begin to see the same mistake in other places, too. I suspect that we will see it everywhere. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.


Commentary:


.... He [Karl Lauterbac] is only worth quoting for two reasons. The lesser of them, is the fact that he’s not-so-subtly helping Moderna with the marketing for their three-in-one combined RSV, Corona and influenza vaccine, which is now in development. Henceforth, the Virus That We Have To Fear In The Fall will always be whatever virus the pharmaceutical companies are hoping to vaccinate against.

The greater point here, though, is that his remarks reveal the total circularity of pandemic management. The problem now is that our measures have caused a population-wide immunity deficit, for which there is no solution but a continuation of measures. We are so far into this farce, that even Lauterbach can proclaim publicly that restrictions have become their own cause, a self-perpetuating end unto themselves, and nobody even blinks or reports on his remarkable admission.



it’s a bizarrely intrinsic article of faith among humanity that one can trade liberty for safety and that if we just put “good, smart people” in change and let them tell us what to do, they will protect us.

of all the pabulum passing as panacea, this one is the one that gets you. over and over. because the sorts of people that float to the top of such systems are never better or smarter this time and the systems themselves are always captured, again and again, by cronyism and special interest. just like last time.

..... neither the media nor the health agencies and officials are staying silent. they are actively gaslighting and flat out making up syndromes to explain away an inconvenient fact pattern: they just pushed the most dangerous and ineffective vaccines in human history upon a credulous public and the effects are starting to get really, really bad and the big truth of it is becoming to vast for the big lie to eclipse.


Anecdotal Fare:



Other Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

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Vid Fare:

It may not be so fictional. However, this 2 minute video is too dangerous for anyone to view so Vimeo removed it. Watch it now before they censor it everywhere


COVID Corporatocracy Fare:


in essence, it’s really simple
  • humans do not like to hold mutually exclusive/contradictory viewpoints
  • you have an image of yourself and your place in the world
  • new information about the world emerges that either agrees or conflicts with this view
  • when it agrees, your view is reinforced
  • when it conflicts you now face a choice: either you change your views, or you change the data
obviously, any rational person tends to seek to change views and/or hold them less strongly when the data goes against them. but cognitive dissonance is not a rational process. it’s not even a conscious process. mostly, it just goes on inside the black box part of your mind that most people don’t or cannot access well. and this is what makes it so powerful.


it acts like a reality filter and it’s one most people do not even realize they possess. its effects are so fundamental that they outright change inputs to your thought process in real time. this can rapidly land you in an outright hallucination.

the key determinants of whether you will change your views or change the incoming input are twofold:

how strongly do you hold your views?

how powerful is the input?

if your views are strongly held, it takes a very powerful, definitive input to move them. sometimes, this is reasonable. steph curry bricks a shot, but it does not rattle his faith in his 3 pointer. but the flipside is that if you hold a view too strongly, all 5 foot 6 of you will be on your 90th attempt to dunk on lebron and screaming about cheating, bad refs, mis-inflated balls, or high frequency cuban lasers distracting you. in the end, you wind up hitler in the bunker moving around armies that don’t exist anymore on a board and thinking victory is right around the corner.

sanity lies in the middle and so we all have to make our best guesses. no one is free of this; this process is universal. life is balancing new data against old models of the world and figuring out what to trust and how to evolve .....

.... which is why all of them from the WHO to the CDC to local health boards are all looking to push for more unaccountable power.

one of the enduring questions here has long been: how can these people be so evil and predatory? how can they engage in such willful fraud and societal harms?

i think there is, perhaps, a better question to ask: what if they aren’t?

i’m not even sure that many of these folks are deliberately lying. they are just lying to themselves.

they have so distorted their own perceptions of the world, bent them in their intense egotistical and emotional gravity wells that they simply cannot inhabit reality. they are off in movies of their own making in which they are the heroes bravely standing against the philistines who cannot see that it’s for their own good.



.... Considering it is no longer in much doubt that Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum has been attempting to lead a global palace coup against the nation state, it has become imperative to scrutinise the words and legacy of this false-prophet of technocracy, Harari.

Here is Yuval Noah Harari on the opportunity that Covid provides for the world’s elite: 
"Covid is critical because this is what convinces people to accept to legitimize total biometric surveillance. We need to not just monitor people, we need to monitor what’s happening under their skin”
...
................
.........

When evil comes disguised as progress, celebrated in ignorance as righteous, when the truth triggers vitriol and disgust, as the good are slandered and silenced, and when the sick are hailed as heroes, while our the natural state of things is ridiculed, then truly we are in dangerous times.



Americans have limitless faith in democracy. In the early 19th century, that charmed Alexis de Tocqueville. His book Democracy in America still rings true today because not much has changed. The entire country can be in ruins and even then, most people figure that it will all be improved or even solved come November. It’s been going on for our entire history. As a people, we believe our elections are what keep the people and not the dictators in charge. 

Surely some of this faith is necessary simply because it is the only option we have. The sitting president and his party are in deep trouble now, and most observers are predicting a rout in the midterm elections, granting us two additional painful years of inflation plus recession unfolding amidst what will surely be a brutal political stalemate and cultural upheaval. Then November will come again and with it another round of trust that the new president will figure something out. 

This faith in our elected leaders is belied by the experiences of the last 30 months. To be sure, the elected politicians are nowhere near blameless in what unfolded and they could have done far more to stop the disaster. Trump could have sent Fauci and Birx packing (maybe?), the Republicans could have voted no on trillions in spending (did they really have a choice?), and Biden could have renormalized the country (why didn’t he?). Instead they all went along…with what? With advisers from the bureaucracies, the people who have de facto ran the country for this entire grim period. 

Reading Scott Atlas’s book, one comes away with a very strange picture of how Washington worked in the first year of the pandemic. Once Trump gave the green light to lockdowns, the permanent bureaucracy had all it needed. In fact, this happened even before Trump approved it: the Department of Health and Human Services had already released its lockdown blueprint on March 13, 2020, a document which had already been weeks in the preparation. After the March 16 press conference, there was no going back. The “deep state” – by which I mean the permanent non-appointed bureaucracy and the pressure groups to which it answers – was running the show.  ....

.... The administrative state is THE government. Elections? They provide just enough difference to lead people to believe they are in charge, but are they? Not according to the organization chart. This is the real problem with the US system today. This system cannot be found in the US Constitution. No one alive voted for it. It just gradually evolved – metastasized – over time. The last 30 months have demonstrated that it is a real cancer eating out the heart of the American experience, and not just here: every country in the world deals with some version of this problem. 


The World Economic Forum (WEF) is one of the most powerful organizations in the world. And, throughout the years, people at the WEF have said some truly insane and dystopian things. And they’ve managed to word these things in the creepiest ways possible. Here are the top 10 most insane things said by the WEF.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

Doctorow: How the war will end…

... I will violate this overriding rule and just this once join the debate over how Russia’s ‘special military operation’ will end.  Nearly all of my peers in Western media and academia give you read-outs based on their shared certainty over Russia’s military and political ambition from the start of the ‘operation,’ how Russia failed by underestimating Ukrainian resilience and professionalism, how Putin must now save face by capturing and holding some part of Ukraine. The subject of disagreement is whether at the end of the campaign the borders will revert to the status quo before 24 February in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality or whether the Russians will have to entirely give up claims on Donbas and possibly even on Crimea.

As for commentators in the European Union, there is exaggerated outrage over alleged Russian aggression, over any possible revision of European borders as enshrined in the Helsinki Act of 1975 and subsequent recommitments by all parties to territorial inviolability of the signatory States. There is the stench of hypocrisy from this crowd as they overlook what they wrought in the deconstruction of Yugoslavia and, in particular, the hiving off of Kosovo from the state of Serbia.

.... To be specific, from the very beginning the number one issue for Moscow as it entered upon its military adventure in Ukraine was geopolitical: to ensure that Ukraine will never again be used as a platform to threaten Russian state security, that Ukraine will never become a NATO member. We may safely assume that internationally guaranteed and supervised neutrality of Ukraine will be part of any peace settlement. It would be nicely supported by a new reality on the ground: namely by carving out several Russia-friendly and Russia-dependent mini-states on the former territory of East and South Ukraine. At the same time this solution removes from the international political agenda many of the accusations that have been made against Russia which support the vicious sanctions now being applied to the RF at great cost to Europe and to the world at large: there will be no territorial acquisitions.

If Kiev is compelled to acknowledge the independence of these two, three or more former oblasts as demanded by their populations, that is a situation fully compatible with the United Nations Charter. In a word, a decision by the Kremlin not to annex parts of Ukraine beyond the Crimea, which has long been quietly accepted by many in Europe, would prepare the way for a gradual return of civilized relations within Europe and even, eventually, with the United States.



In a video published yesterday Gonzalo Lire, currently under house arrest in Karkov, is asking a very interesting question:


Lira states, and I agree with him, that Russia will win the war in the Ukraine, take the south and east to likely create a new country and leave the rest of the cadaver for Poland, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania and others to feast on.

But then what?

The U.S. controlled NATO will still be there. It is practically guaranteed that the U.S. will use it to push for revenge for the loss of Ukraine. This will be done by a steady buildup of troops and long range missile capabilities along Russia's Nordic and Baltic borders and additional naval threats in the northern Arctic as well as the southern Black Sea. Some ten years from now the U.S. would be able to again try to wage a big (proxy) war against Russia. Then with a decent chance to win.

No negotiations or peace agreements will prevent that. The U.S. is famously non-agreement-capable (недоговороспособны). It has broken ALL promises and agreements it has ever made with Russia.

Dozens of U.S. and European luminaries had promised to Russia that NATO would expand 'not one inch' towards Russia. Look where its borders are now. The U.S. and the EU have confiscated huge amounts of Russian state owned money. They have even taken, in contradiction to their own constitutions, the properties of private Russian citizens just because those persons happen to be Russian.

In 2014 Germany and France signed on to guarantee elections for a peaceful regime change in Kiev. A day later the fascists stormed the Ukrainian parliament and those guarantees turned out to be totally worthless. The U.S. simply said fuck the EU. It does not give shit about European interests. Germany and France later negotiated and signed the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements. They continued to feed billions of EU money into Ukraine even as the Ukrainian government, controlled by the U.S., did nothing to fulfill them. Yes, they were that stupid.

The U.S. has installed 'missile defense' systems in Poland and Romania which are in fact designed to lob Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM) onto Moscow. These are a serious danger to Russia.

Even after Ukraine is finished, NATO and its EU proxies will continue to be a danger to Russia. Both have proven to be unable to keep promises. Russia in consequence will have to rearrange them. ...

... After more than 20 years of watching Lavrov and Putin everyone should know that they do not publicly set out aims if they have no way to achieve them. They always have well thought out plans before announcing their goals.

So how can Russia actually achieve a retreat of NATO back to its 1997 borders?

.... Russia can achieve this at any time. It simply has to stop supplying gas and oil to Europe.

... Only with new and decent leaders will Europe come to its senses.

Russia can help to achieve that while at the same time solving its NATO problem.

It can publicly declare that:

THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER RUSSIAN SUPPLIES OF ANY KIND TO EUROPE UNTIL IT BREAKS WITH WASHINGTON.

What would follow? ...

... Europe is fortunate in that Russia, even before re-entering the Ukraine, has offered a very decent alternative to U.S. hegemony in Europe:



.......... But then something went horribly wrong. Putin pre-empted the Ukrainian attack and lit a backfire by sending in tank columns into territory previously controlled by the Kiev regime, scrambling its logistics throwing its battle plans into ghastly disarray. Then he set about methodically blowing up the Ukraine’s warmaking capacity using standoff weapons. According to schedule, it will be all gone later this month, Western military aid notwithstanding. And then it turned out that Russia was ready for “sanctions from Hell,” having spent eight years preparing for them, and was able to sustain the blow, which then bounced back onto the West and started smashing it to bits. The West reflexively continued to follow the Ukrainian pattern and blame it all on Putin. By now the alternative narrative of an all-powerful Lord Putin is fully formed and we should expect to hear more and more voices clamoring for negotiation and compromise with him.

The aforementioned Tucker Carlson is one of these voices, and his influence on his vast audience sets the tone for a significant chunk of electorate in the US—not that their vote counts for much. Much more surprisingly, the same opinion was voiced at Davos by none other than that talking fossil Henry Kissinger! In response, the Ukrainians added Kissinger to their… terrorist database. Various Kiev regime mouthpieces positively choked from fury. How could he? Doesn’t he know that negotiating with Putin is strictly verboten? That narrative must be suppressed—in the Ukraine and in the West!

...... From the time of Genghis Khan’s Empire of the Blue Sky, which at one point encompassed Russia, China, Korea, India and Persia (and featured the familiar Russian themes of collective security and obligatory mutual aid) and until the present time Russia has stood alone in its perennial conflict with the West. But now Putin, standing alone, stands a chance of cementing a gigantic international alliance of non-Western nations, comprising the vast majority of the world’s population, an independent and plentiful resource base and well over half of all the economic power. Nobody else has anywhere near this level of Western public relations support, care of the “blame Putin” campaign. Putin’s only peer competitor in vying for the position of a new Genghis Khan is Xi Jinping, who would very much want to join the coalition as Putin’s equal. But China has a test to pass before this dream can be realized: it must reconquer Taiwan. Avenging the humiliation it suffered at the hands of the Japanese would be a nice additional feather in its cap. Once Russia expels the US from the Ukraine and China expels the US from Taiwan, the path toward Eurasian unification will be clear.

What, if anything, should the West do about that? Why, blame Putin for it all, of course!






Orwellian Fare:





CaitOz Fare:


...... A lot of people talk about the “hypocrisy” of the US empire, as though being hypocritical is the issue. But the complete lack of moral consistency in US imperial behavior is noteworthy not merely because of hypocrisy: it’s noteworthy because it shows the US empire has no morality.

Despite the astonishing deluge of propaganda and brazen government disinformation we’re being blasted in the face with painting the war in Ukraine as a fight between good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny, democracy versus autocracy, the truth is much less flattering to the imperial ego. In reality, the US is waging a proxy war in Ukraine for the exact same reason it remains close with Saudi Arabia: because it advances its own interests to do so.

That’s it. That’s the whole entire story. The US doesn’t care about Ukrainian freedom or Ukrainian lives, it cares about strengthening its Eurasian geostrategic hegemony, and it would cheerfully incinerate every Ukrainian alive in order to accomplish that goal.

..... In truth, when you look at its overall behavior on the world stage, the US is far more murderous and tyrannical than either Russia or Saudi Arabia . Pretending that Biden is lowering the United States beneath its values by visiting Saudi Arabia is highly flattering to the US. If anything, it’s the other way around.



...... These are the kind of people who run the world. The imperial machine is packed to the rafters with sniveling power worshippers of this variety, people who choose to spend their lives clawing their way up into positions of influence within the most depraved power structure on the face of this planet, demonstrating their worthiness by their continual willingness to advocate awful things no matter how reckless or stupid.

This is why the world is as it is. The systems which allocate power and wealth elevate the worst among us to the most consequential of positions, where they are then free to act out their own inner misery on the rest of humanity and keep us in a state of suffering and trauma. Nothing will get better until we change those systems.



Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.

.... Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.

Tweets & Vids:
....

Other Fare:

Lawrence: "'Geophobes.’"
Our 'national character' obsession.

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

..... It behooves us now to understand all of the errors of America’s geophobic ways because they are going to serve the republic badly in the 21st century

...... Sartre mauled the case for essentialism with suitable dispatch in Being and Nothingness. “Existence precedes essence,” he famously argued in that difficult but highly rewarding book. This is not a hair-split. It means that human beings, what they think and how they act are determined by the choices they make in response to the conditions of their lives, not by some innate aspect of their character.

.... Any nation’s leaders and diplomats are supposed to guide their citizens against excesses of hatred and xenophobia rooted in ideas of national character. Not America’s. They stoke this fire every chance they get:



On Wednesday, a jury in Fairfax, Virginia found for actor Johnny Depp in his defamation lawsuit against his former wife, actress Amber Heard. The verdict is a significant defeat for the #MeToo sexual misconduct witch-hunt and a victory for the defense of elementary legal norms, including the presumption of innocence and the right to due process.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Doomberg: Wide Awake
“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.” – Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was a brilliant scientist, gifted orator, skilled teacher, and effective advocate for his strongly held beliefs. .....
... “The civilization now in jeopardy is all humanity. As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and sky. In our tenure on this planet, we have accumulated dangerous, evolutionary baggage – propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. We have also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, a desire to learn from history and experience, and a great, soaring passionate intelligence – the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet earth. But up and in the cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evidenced when we view the earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. ...
.... for Sagan was an unabashed supporter of rigorous, evidence-based thinking who stood ready to reverse previously held views should the data dictate such a shift was necessary.

How is science meant to work? The purpose of the scientific method is to explain the observable universe. Scientists develop hypotheses – mental models for how they think certain aspects of the universe can be understood – and they then submit those hypotheses to the scientific community for rigorous criticism. The entire point of science is to unrelentingly try to nullify hypotheses through experimentation and data collection. The hypotheses that survive the harshest criticisms may eventually graduate to the level of a theory. If a theory survives several more decades of intellectual attack, it might then graduate to the level of a law, which you can think of as an axiomatic input into the development of yet more hypotheses. But even laws are susceptible to a single nullifying observation, as Einstein ultimately proved when he nullified Newton’s laws of physics, which had previously enjoyed centuries of status as bedrock axioms of science. Einstein ultimately gave birth to quantum mechanics, and while quantum mechanics might currently explain much of the universe as we can observe it, it too stands one reproducible data point away from nullification.

If you are in favor of limiting criticism of scientific hypotheses or constraining debate about the meaning of evidentiary data, science grinds to a halt. Even if you think the people doing the critiquing are being disingenuous, or they are funded by nefarious characters seeking to exploit ambiguity for monetary gain, or you convince yourself that the mere airing of such critiques is a danger to society, the moment you give in to the temptation to censor counterarguments – to label them as misinformation, for example – you’ve lost. Either you are willing to outlast your opponents in an extended debate by patiently and calmly rebutting all critiques, or the soundness of your hypothesis must be considered suspect.







Satirical Fare:

Schizer (on youtube)

or on rumble



Pics of the Week:

from Hanania:


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