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Sunday, June 19, 2022

2022-06-19

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

Economic and Market Fare:

*** Romanchuk: Hike Until Something Breaks

Although neoclassical macroeconomic theory does its utmost to obfuscate matters, monetary policy in practice is straightforward: central bankers react with a lag to economic data, and if they are panicked about inflation, they hike rates until something breaks. Although that description is more flippant than how conventional economists would describe the situation, it probably represents a consensus view. However, there is a hidden complexity: do things “break” because of rate hikes, or do they break on their own?

... The typical pattern of oil prices is to overshoot and violently reverse. Given the detachment of trading behaviour from fundamentals, I would have no confidence in peak price predictions. Instead, I think the forecast challenge is more time-based: how long until something blows up? 

.... To get the Fed off the rate hike path, something has to give. The challenge is guessing where the weak link is. I will run through the major candidates in order of severity. ...

... Finally, I want to emphasise the limited usefulness of mathematical macro theory. The only place where such a theory would have been of use is giving a better inflation forecast in 2021. Given that “transitory” was the base case for central bank economists (as well as being close to a consensus view). it is clear that the conventional models were not entirely helpful. ... At this point, worrying about the innards of inflation is a secondary concern relative to the “will anything break?” question.



That’s the question millions are asking, or hopefully at least the folks at the Fed making decisions on interest rates. Ostensibly, the Fed is concerned that the economy is too strong and that we are either on the edge, or already stuck in, the sort of wage-price spiral that led to double digit inflation back in the 1970s. The story back then was that higher prices led workers to demand higher wages, which in turn raised costs and pushed prices still higher.

The Fed has begun to raise interest rates to head off this risk. There are many who are urging the Fed to raise rates faster than they have thus far planned, claiming that we are already in this dangerous spiral.

The problem with that story is that, rather than spiraling upward, wage growth has actually been slowing in recent months. ...



...... I could continue into the weeds of the various policy changes along with a bit of luck on the demographics side, but I’ve hit enough of the high points to give you a flavor of what was afoot while Volcker was supposedly single-handedly taming inflation. What’s interesting is that despite rapidly accelerating fiscal deficits during the 1980s, inflation continued to subside. 

... Here’s my alternative view; what if monetary actions mostly serve to impact the price of risk assets, while fiscal mostly impacts the economy’s growth rate, and government policy mostly controls for inflation? As I’ve experienced the interplay of these three factors over more than two decades as an investor, I increasingly think that this is the case.

... I just think that our collective knowledge has evolved in a way that most people are ignoring many of the other factors that may have had a much greater role in reducing the runaway inflation of the 1970s. 


*** Roberts: A tightening world

.... Ostensibly, the purpose of raising central bank policy rates is to force up interest rates for borrowing by banks, households and corporations.  This will eventually reduce spending on homes, consumer products and investment in financial assets like stocks and bonds, and also productive investment in equipment, building and software.  That supposedly will eventually cool overall demand and so inflation rates will subside.

But will it work; or even more, will it work without engendering a slump in the major economies?  The answer lies partly on whether you accept the mainstream arguments on what causes inflation to rise.  I have discussed this at length in various posts.  The first main theory is monetarist; namely central banks ‘print’ too much money relative to output of goods: ‘too much money chasing too few goods’; and so price inflation rises.  If central banks raise rates and reduce the amount of money they print then inflation will subside.

Fed chair Jay Powell still seems to adopt the monetarist approach ......

Really? All the evidence of the last 60 years shows that monetary policy is not the driver of inflation or disinflation and is, at best, a secondary reacting factor.  The real driver is the relationship between the productive output in an economy and the demand engendered by incomes from capitalist companies and workers households.

But that does not mean that it is ‘aggregate demand’ that decides the level of inflation and in particular, the demand generated by too much ‘wage pressure’. This is the Keynesian argument for inflation: ‘excessive demand’ and ‘wage-push’ on costs. The latest exponent of the Keynesian ‘excess demand’ theory is former US Treasury secretary and Keynesian guru of ‘secular stagnation’, Larry Summers.  .....

Where Summers and the Keynesians are wrong is that it is not excessive demand that has driven up inflation rate in goods and services that people use, it is the weakening of supply. ....

Productivity growth was very low and employment growth was slowing.  Capitalist production and investment slowed because the profitability of capital in the major economies had reached near historic lows before the pandemic.  



1. NEGATIVE “REAL REAL RATES”

We believe that Central Banks are trapped between inflation and bubbles too-big-to-fail, both problems they created in the first place with reckless monetary and fiscal policies without limits.

In the immediate short term, Central Banks have no choice but to hike nominal interest rates. So, for now, the path is for higher nominal rates. US Treasury curve is now pricing in 10 Fed rate hikes of 0.25% by year-end, and given there are 5 Fed meetings before year-end (starting with this week), implies a 0.50% hike every meeting… The current path of rate hikes is too complacent, in our view, and assumes that the economy AND markets will cope with the hikes without blowing up. Wishful thinking in our view.

In the short to medium term, we believe the hikes will invariably lead to stress in credit markets. At that point, we expect Central Banks to pause and reverse the current path of hikes as, unfortunately, the damage is already done as just a few small hikes will be sufficient to expose the fragility of the system and trigger the burst of the systemic bubbles across the system.

In other words, we believe the Central Bank hiking cycle of nominal rates is capped by unsustainably high levels of debt and believe the global system could/will blow up as/when Central Bank raise rates too much. In our monthly newsletter in January, we indicated trouble above 1.5% in front-end rates. We stand by our view, which stands in stark contrast to the current complacency with the path hikes implied by the markets, pointing to 2 years above 3%.

.... We have not seen any major stress or distress in credit markets yet, which could start to appear anywhere at any time. Credit stress will be the real test for Central Banks’ resolve to hike, and in our view will surely result in a reversal of the hikes and a return to more monetary and fiscal accommodation, which will not resolve the problems but rather delay, transfer, transform and enlarge them even further, this time into stagflation. 

...... Time will tell how much Central Banks will be able to hike nominal Rates, but in our view 1) will not hike as much as it is currently priced in 2) there is a non-negligible probability Central Banks will be forced to reverse course and unwind some of the hikes (similar to what happened in 2018, when the Fed was in "auto-pilot” hiking rates but had to reverse the hikes to contain the hostile markets of 4Q18), and 3) there is a non-negligible probability that we may see zero nominal rates, QE, and even Yield Curve Control “YCC” in response to distressed global markets. Faced with systemic risk and inflation, they will always choose inflation. 



The Federal Reserve took a more aggressive swing at red-hot inflation at its June FOMC meeting, raising interest rates by 3/4%. It was the biggest hike since 1994. The question is will this be the last swing at inflation?

.... He insists the economy remains strong and the American consumer is healthy.

I’m not convinced about any of this.

................ The mainstream praised the Fed for its aggressive move against inflation. The stock market even rallied. But in the big scheme of things, this was not particularly aggressive. FOMC members think that pushing rates to 3.5 to 4% should do the trick. Remember, Paul Volker had to run rates up to 20% to slay the inflation dragon of the 1970s. That was well above the CPI at the time, meaning the Fed would need to get rates over 8% to tame the current bout of inflation. (And of course, the actual CPI is much closer to those 1970s levels than the cooked numbers used today indicate.)

I don’t think it will even get rates to 3%.

........... Powell seems to be in complete denial about the condition of the economy. 

............ The data indicates the economy is at a tipping point. If this rate hike doesn’t push it over the edge, the next one almost certainly will.




..... The public may hate that transitory doesn’t just disappear from the macro vocabulary after a couple days or weeks. Supply shocks take time to work themselves out, but work themselves out they will. Enough pain, because not enough legit economy, the downside case is inevitable if its timing beyond difficult to predict.

There’s a growing catalog of data adding witness to these same inflection-able months, too. ...



Under the Cinderella hypothesis, the Fed raises rates to the "neutral" level aka. 3% as quickly as possible. Which gives them a theoretical buffer for THEIR ensuing recession. That strategy makes two ASININE assumptions. One that markets don't explode in the meantime. And two that recession isn't ALREADY in progress. 

Unfortunately, there are many signs that the economy is tipping into recession:

> Negative Q1 GDP
> Record low consumer sentiment
> Oil shock/inflation shock
> Bear market in stocks
> Elevated VIX
> Inverted yield curve
> Slowing housing sales
> Collapsed personal savings rate
> Recession-level car sales
> Collapsing durable goods consumption
> Corporate profit recession/Margin collapse

......... All FOUR of those mistakes are now being repeated. First off, the Fed's own financial stress index is at record lows. Secondly, as I showed above the Fed is ignoring incipient recession. In 2008, the recession began nine months before Lehman. Third, the Fed is assuming that markets can handle this much liquidity withdrawal all at one time. An asinine assumption that will soon be system tested. 

..... Investors are NOT positioned for imminent deflation. They've been told all year that INFLATION is the biggest risk to markets. 







............. the implication for broader inflation is clear: most prices that make up the core CPI basket are about to fall off a cliff in weeks if not days, with upcoming core CPI prints set to plunge, which means that the only thing that will remain red hot is headline inflation, i.e., food and energy prices, the same prices which the Fed has traditionally ignored. It remains to be seen if it will do so this time around, or if - realizing that the US is entering a recession - it will resume easing even in the face of $5 gas prices


QsOTW:

Snider: At his last press conference, Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell made a bunch of unsubstantiated claims, none of which were called out or even questioned by the assembled reporters. These rituals are designed to project authority not conduct inquiry, and this one was perhaps the best representation of that intent.


Tchir: As discussed on Friday, Soft Landing has fallen off the lead with Recession Next Year looking strong, but from deep in the pack, Summer Recession is making a move! I remember during the financial crisis that we only “found out” we were in a recession AFTER the group that provides such calculations revised their data. It is, sadly, not unchartered territory to be in a recession and not “officially” know it. Every person living during that time knew it, but the data gods were a little behind. I’m increasingly worried that is the case right now.


Every: In short, we can ignore ‘stagflation’ and can proceed to a new word shared by an incisive reader: “Incession” – inflation and recession. I repeat that we aren’t used to that concept in developed markets by any name, but emerging markets know the phenomenon all too well. Congratulations to the Western leadership of the past four decades, who have successfully turned our economies into something closer to emerging markets!


Blain: The tipping point is not a question of if, but when. The number of threats facing markets; from inflation, central bank hikes, war, geopolitics, recession risks, corporate earnings and bond liquidity are legion. The big risk is they combine into a chaotic tipping point, at which moment we will just have to pick up the pieces…. Again.


Read: We seem to be trading like it’s a race to see which central bank can crash their respective economies the fastest: taming inflation clearly supersedes any central bank inflicted damage to the real economy. What we can say is that the fact that markets are pricing rate cuts in 12-18 months out might be a sign of just how precarious things are, and the runway for a “soft-ish landing“ is getting shorter.


Tchir: I believe that the country is going to learn that a recession is worse for votes than high inflation and the 75 bp hike likely speeds along some of the many issues facing the economy.


Aitkens: I remain convinced that a major inventory liquidation is about to become apparent in the data for a growing number of industries (including many retailers, but not autos). The CPI hasn't picked it up yet, but we certainly have heard from many retailers of their plans to clear excess inventory. The goods sector has half the weight of the service sector, but more than twice the cyclicality. Goods deflation will help offset services inflation leading to lower than expected core inflation in the months ahead. As inflation moderates, the risk of recession will fade.


Mac10: At this latent juncture, the Fed is totally out of control. Six months ago they believed inflation was transitory, yet now they believe this is 1978 all over again. Powell desperately wants to be the new Volcker - a central banker who was vilified at the time, but later venerated for having the intestinal fortitude to "stamp out inflation". Because what could be worse than inflation? Total global asset meltdown that's what. You see, what all of today's pundits have in common is that they don't understand the rules of Japanification. First and foremost a central bank must never over-tighten and cause an out-of-control asset crash. Why? Because they don't have the monetary tools to get it back under control. The Fed currently has .75% dry powder. Likely going up another .75% to 1.5% on Wednesday. Still, that's not nearly enough to offset a financial meltdown.


Cleveland: “Joe Biden says he can’t remember a time when the American economy was stronger than it is today and I, for one, completely believe him.”


...


Charts: 
1:



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

From narratives about fossil fuels as a solution to climate advocates as out of touch with reality, here’s how the fossil fuel industry and its allies are weaponizing words to delay climate action.


Building an electric truck makes far more emissions than a gas one. So where’s the break-even point when they both hit the road? We decided to find out.




BM, MF, what are your thoughts on this? how would you respond?
MF, you don't know me at all, but BM, you wouldn't be surprised, I imagine, if I told you that there is little in here that I disagree with, except perhaps that it doesn't go far enough:
In this issue: ▸ The finance sector is disconnected ▸ Missing out on two big opportunities ▸ ESG Fraud ▸ Rationalising deception ▸ A post-global ESG ▸ And much more

Disruption. I kept repeating that word for myself, while sitting and listening to opening plenary session in one of the largest ESG investment conferences lately. Disruption. The conference went on. Sessions went on, panels were conducted in an ordinary fashion, people mostly agreeing with each other, friendly almost collegial atmosphere. We are all in this together. Business it is. At some point I hear someone say, “it’s better than 10 years ago, now we have targets, before it was all blur, now we have targets.”

I went in and out from sessions, searching for disruption. I could settle with resistance too. Although disruption is more what I like. Panic is not nice, but even that would have been completely ok. Nope. Elegant navel viewing in all sorts and shapes. We are good. We are doing fine. We have data, we have solutions, we have products. World is burning. Right now. Throughout the space where vendors and service providers compete for attention images of data streams, blue skies, and green pastures. Business it is.

Disruption. Resistance. In the beginning, now 20 years ago, the ESG movement had those qualities, had the ambition to disrupt what did not work and provide something better, had the courage to resist the inherently arrogant financial mainstream that typically used performance argument when participating in some panel and discussion. Now mainstream runs ESG. Controls the narrative, sets the boundaries, and slowly but surely transforms what ESG was intended to do into a tame pet. A plain vanilla thing.

The entire idea of integrating ESG was to change the underlying investment processes’ valuation models, not to adjust to unsustainable financial theories that dominate the valuation of assets. Right now ESG is no longer a disruptive force. And that is precisely what it needs to be. 

The core of the challenge with our unsustainable economic system is not resolved, the emissions generated by our investments and lending activities are still catastrophic, our investments are not creating tangible outcomes. We have a problem, a big one. In several of the sessions people addressed the need for more data and more reporting. What is the point if we really don’t want to change anything.

Maybe that would be a good conference topic for the next ESG event somewhere in the world: “Is the current ESG market really changing anything and has it what it takes to really change anything?” I would love to participate in that one. ...

... Panic is the right mode for this. Pure and shear panic. From 2018 to 2020, ESG assets under management grew from $22.8 trillion to $35 trillion, with estimates that they will make up a third ($53 trillion) of all assets under management by 2025. And we have achieved. Nothing. ....

........................... You can laugh or cry or scream, but that is the case.



Endemic Fare:

Monkeypox: Avoiding the Mistakes of Past Infectious Disease Epidemics


Other Fare:

Recovering the “forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence” alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.

There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life. When you die — when these organized atoms that shimmer with fascination and feeling — disband into disorder to become unfeeling stardust once more, everything that filled your particular mind and its rosary of days with meaning will be gone too. From its particular vantage point, there will be no more meaning, for the point itself will have dissolved — there will only be other humans left, making meaning of their own lives, including any meaning they might make of the residue of yours.

......... With an eye to the absurdity of pessimism as a life-orientation, given the astonishing good luck of existing at all in a universe where the probability is overwhelmingly against it, he adds:
No man* knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.


Pics of the Week:

All of Yellowstone will be evacuated, Gardiner is 'isolated'





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Marcetic: While Elites Fret About Inflation and Worker Wages, CEOs Are Robbing Us Blind
The Fed has embarked on an anti-inflation policy designed to destroy jobs and keep wages low. But a new report shows just how exorbitantly CEOs are profiting from the price hikes.


PLUS: A new poll shows banning secret subsidy deals is a good political move.






Ehret: How Capitalism Became a Time Bomb and the Need for a New System



Unsustainability Fare:


For as long as climate change was off in the distant future, governments have been able to trade warm words for concrete action.  In a similar vein, a certain kind of green politician has been able to trade on the pretence that ending fossil fuel use would come at no cost.  Meanwhile, the diesel fuel kept the arteries of the global supply chains flowing even as ever more coal and gas supplied the heat and power for the technological engines of economic growth.  At the same time, the rest of us could signal our impotent virtue by recycling ...

... By 2017, real-life James Bond Villain Klaus Schwab was inviting celebrities, representatives of the technocracy, the godzillionaires and the political class to fly their carbon-belching private jets to Switzerland to learn about The Fourth Industrial Revolution, and to discuss how they could get the little people to cut their carbon footprints. By 2020, this had morphed in to the Green New Great Reset in which we – but not they, of course – would own nothing, and allegedly be happy as we ate our insects, spent our central bank digital basic incomes, and were driven around in a new fleet of corporate-owned, hydrogen-powered self-driving cars. 

There was – to paraphrase Captain Blackadder – just one teensy-weensy problem with the Great Plan adopted by the Davos crowd… it was bollocks! Only by ignoring the physicists, engineers and technicians who were expected to make it happen, and by listening instead to the siren voices of climate NGOs, bankers and economists, could the technocracy convince itself that the world could seamlessly transition to the proposed bright green future. And to our cost, politicians of all stripes who bought into this nonsense are now grappling with the inevitable economic consequences. 

The problem, at is simplest, is that much of what was considered “green” was largely a conjuring trick. States like Britain and Germany, which claim to be world leaders simply offshored their most polluting industries (and a large part of the waste) to less prosperous parts of the world where governments were happy to load the environmental costs onto the indigenous population in exchange for tradable foreign currency.

This was the only politically-acceptable means of hiding the fact that there is simply no way of maintaining even a fraction of the western standard of living in the event that anyone were foolish enough to remove the fossil fuels which make up some 80 percent of the energy mix in the UK, and 85 percent of the global economy. 

Even this is a simplification of the problem because each fuel source has its uses in specific niches of the global economy and so is not interchangeable. Wind and solar, for example, cannot generate the heat required to manufacture steel (although they can recycle it) or, ironically, to produce the silicon wafers and high-grade glass required in solar panels.

.... The economists behind the Great New Green Reset will tell you that there is nothing to worry about because of the “law” of infinite substitutability – the idea that if we run out of an input to the economy, we will simply find an alternative.  Nor is this the only thing that the economists are simply wrong about.  More worryingly, most economists believe that the economy operates independently of energy.  Among other things, this is why they fail to understand that the current, accelerating stagflation is largely a consequence of their own past actions.

Not only is the economy an energy system (onto which we have imposed a system of monetary claims) but it requires growing surplus energy to avoid collapse.  Before we can use energy, we must first obtain it.  And obtaining energy has an energy cost of its own.  And so, the more energy required to obtain energy, the less surplus energy is available to power the wider economy, unless we keep growing the amount of energy produced.

So why might surplus energy fall?  Three key reasons are important to us today.  The first is the simple process by which we work our way from the cheap and easy energy through to the expensive and difficult.  Nobody dug deep coal mines out beneath the North Sea when there were still seams of coal jutting out of the sides of Welsh hills, just as nobody spent a fortune hydraulically fracturing a shale deposit when they could knock a pipe a few feet into the ground to unleash a gusher of sweet crude.  Second, we have been burning fossil fuels at a far faster rate than we have been discovering new deposits.  As a result, we have already passed peak oil, and are rapidly approaching peak gas and coal too.  Third, for green policy purposes, we have been disinvesting from further fossil fuel development while adding energy-expensive and difficult to incorporate energy-harvesting technologies into the energy mix.

By making the energy cost of energy grow in this way, we strip the wider economy of the means to prevent a rapid and potentially catastrophic collapse as we approach a “net energy cliff:”

.......... The hope was that various “environmentally friendly” policies could be smuggled in by stealth.  And for a long time, it didn’t seem to matter because it was all a long way in the future, by which time it would be someone else’s problem.

Well, that future has arrived, and the eco-austerity is only just beginning. ....



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
Many points of evidence suggest that we're worrying about reinfection and mortality rates that aren't that remarkable in the context of other viral pathogens

... Corona, it is true, circulates preferentially among the vaccinated. This is probably because the vaccines fix immune response on the wild-type spike protein, giving new variants with a slightly different spike the keys to the kingdom. It is probably also because the vaccines downregulate generalised, innate immune reactions in the vaccinated, causing their immune systems to “function more like those of the bats who carry these viruses with them,” in the words of friend-of-the-blog Rintrah Radagast. Sub-optimal doesn’t mean catastrophic, though. There’s no evidence I can find that people are suffering substantially higher rates of respiratory illness now than in the past. It looks a lot like we got lucky: Omicron emerged just in time to spare us the worst consequences of our imprudence.

Reports of constant reinfections might sound bad, but the truth is that we’ve never tested this widely for any other virus in history. Our knowledge of SARS-2, its reaction to vaccines, and its associations with all-cause mortality, is totally unique and we have no basis for comparison.

For all that’s been written about the prodigious transmissibility of Corona, it was a fairly rare virus before this year. With the emergence of Omicron, it’s become more pervasive, but in terms of infectiousness, it’s not doing anything that other viruses aren’t doing: ...

... Our strength has always lain with our willingness to provide context and perspective to disease statistics that sound scary in isolation. We shouldn’t lose sight of this, just because the vaccinators and their mRNA elixirs are now implicated in the dynamics of SARS-2 infections. The pandemic is over with. If we want any of the old normal back, we have to let exposure to Corona become a routine part of everyday life.


It is testament to mankind’s enduring optimism, as much as our enduring hubris, that with every generation hope should spring anew that the fundamental forces which have governed our affairs since time immemorial have changed for the better. After each passing calamity, the majority are once again lulled back into the comforting fantasy that we’ve reached the end of history, that the perennially destructive impulses of vanity, pride, greed, narcissism, cowardice, and inhumanity have been consigned to mere curiosities in our books and historical records, no longer playing any significant role in the decision-making of those with the power to shape our reality and the causes to which they recruit us. No event in living memory has lain bare the folly of that notion than the response to Covid-19.

At every turn, the story of the world’s response to Covid is the story of power: The perception of it, the exercise of it, the fear of it, the abuse of it, and the pathological lengths to which some will go to obtain it. 

During the response to Covid, we witnessed the ability of those who were perceived as having power to simply make up reality as they went along. They were able to redefine scientific terms, causality, history, and even entire principles of the enlightenment virtually at leisure. ...




Boosters and such.


uncommonly clear eyed discussion of why the covid vaccine development strategies don't make any sense

........... they all made the same bad choice because they all got the same crib-sheet from the same source and this is how the teacher catches you: because you all gave the same wrong answer to a simple question on the exam.



As official government data is emerging in Europe and the USA on the alarming numbers of deaths and permanent paralysis as well as other severe side effects from the experimental mRNA vaccines, it is becoming clear that we are being asked to be human guinea pigs in an experiment that could alter the human gene structure and far worse. While mainstream media ignores alarming data including death of countless healthy young victims, the politics of the corona vaccine is being advanced by Washington and Brussels along with WHO and the Vaccine Cartel with all the compassion of a mafia “offer you can’t refuse.” ...



one of the great early misapprehensions about mRNA vaccines is that they would not have widespread, systematic effects, instead remaining relatively localized. this was rapidly debunked and early studies showed widespread penetration of organs with a particular and perhaps unfortunate preference for concentration in ovaries and testes. (this was discovered early in japan, then denied vehemently by armies of “fact checkers” only wind up proven in pfizer’s own documents gained through FOIA and lawsuit.)

these mRNA drugs are broadly systemic and concentrate in (amongst others) reproductive organs and effects on menstrual cycles are widely documented. ...

... and the results are, well, nuts. (sorry)

..................... and THAT is why vaccine development generally takes place over 5-10 years, not 5-7 months.

best i can tell, we cannot even yet rule out that these effects are permanent.

and, of course, we have zero idea what they might do to pre-adolescents and possible impacts on their healthy sexual development and ultimate fertility.

........ to trade upon that trust while abandoning all the safeguards that enabled it is bad science and worse public health policy.

how many more examples of unforeseen outcomes must we endure before this simple truth is accepted?


Smalley: Swan song

I feel like I’ve only got one more post in me but hopefully it will be useful. The ONS have agreed to provide me every death by single year of age and date of occurrence in England since 2014.

I have had to pay £360 for the privilege so I suppose I had better make it a good one.

So, this is most likely my penultimate post. It just feels like we keep saying the same thing over and over, sure with different data from different countries but it all amounts to the same and we have done enough.

But when I’m done, I cannot recommend these highly enough to keep fighting the good fight:




And comes to the inevitable conclusion

In March, Japanese TV reported on people suffering from post-vaccine syndrome. I wrote it up since it was far more honest than most of the gaslighting produced by mainstream English-language broadcasters on the topic of Covid vaccines (and 99.9% of Japanese broadcasting if we’re being honest). Last week, Japanese TV broadcast another segment on long-term vaccine adverse events (AEs) (the original can be viewed here), so let’s see what it showed. ...


Proposals to Give Covid Vaccine to Babies Would be Laughed Out in Any Normal Country

Several substackers whom I highly respect, posted incredibly insightful articles, delving deeply into intentionally obfuscated reports provided by Big Pharma to make the FDA approve “infant Covid vaccines”. These Substack articles dug into numbers, deciphered the undecipherable, and pointed out flaws in vaccine justifications, hidden injuries, and exposed the true aims of vaccine companies who want to avoid liability for fraud and injuries. I will miss some references, but here are the two articles that I want to cite: ...

.... In any country with a functioning regulator and honest press, both press and regulators would laugh out drug companies who would put forth a proposal so nonsensical as “Infant Covid Vaccine”. ....


insanely enraging:

The HART group is a group of highly respected independent doctors and scientists. My friend, Professor Norman Fenton, is a member of this group.

In this 4 minute video, Dr. Clare Craig, co-chair of the HART group, explains the clinical trial that was used to justify vaccinating our kids. She was appalled.

The only conclusion you can draw after watching this video is that the people running the FDA, CDC and the members of the outside committees approving these vaccines are either completely incompetent or totally bought off.

Everyone should watch this video.


The FDA is willing to sacrifice the health of 19 million little kids to cover up the evidence of a crime

I. Introduction, a shell game to hide the bad data

The risk benefit document for Moderna is 190 pages single-spaced. It was released two business days before the June 14-15 VRBPAC meeting. A similar risk benefit assessment for Pfizer’s EUA application for kids under 5 will be released tomorrow (just 24 hours before the meeting). This guarantees that NONE of the members of the VRBPAC will have read either of these documents prior to the meeting — which is exactly what the cartel wants. .......

.....

III. It’s all harms

Let’s talk about harms from this shot (and remember, it’s all harms in this population because the shot made no difference on real world health outcomes). And there, things get really weird really fast.

The median study follow-up duration was just 53 days after dose 2. After that they wiped out the control group. Here’s how they justified it: ....

....

IV. The way that the FDA rigged the myocarditis data is absolutely sinister

I know that this article is already long but I need to flag one more essential point. ...


*** go to link for [many] pics of "clots"
The modified spike protein is dangerous and for very specific reasons.

.......... In conclusion, they are not “blood” clots. They are structures in the blood. They are “structural clots” or “fibrous clots” that are extremely large and are being constructed inside the body over time.

My grave concern is that every person who has been injected with mRNA instructions may be constructing these fibrous structures inside their bodies at this very minute, and that it’s only a matter of time before they block major arteries or cause heart attacks, strokes or other acute causes of “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” (SADS).

I believe these structures may very well explain why so many seemingly healthy adults are suddenly dying.

...... 
I think we are dealing with a devilishly insipid hand-crafted (modified) RNA whose protein by-products (that appear to be multi-dimensional), following either translation, or digestion for MHC presentation, are amyloidogenic. Clinical presentation = systemic plaques/proteination of affected areas/tissues/vessels.

The location of the plaque formation/proteination would depend on many factors such as:
  1. whether or not the injection was intra-muscular or into the blood,
  2. the initial bio-distribution of the LNPs,
  3. the efficiency of delivery of the modified RNA payload,
  4. the integrity of the modified RNA template,
  5. the rate and efficacy of translation,
  6. the products of translation (which would depend on template(s),
  7. the immune response to the presence of the foreign proteins,
  8. the immune state of the individual prior to injection (chronic low level inflammation?)
just to name a few.

I leave it here for now.


just listen for 3 minutes...total evisceration of the FDA:


Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

eugyppius: I am so, so tired of masks, but more than that, I am sick to death of these unkillable zombie virus solutions that we can apparently never get rid of, no matter how often or how thoroughly they’re discredited by common sense and empirical studies, no matter whether their original justification even applies anymore.




Musicians in Ghana and Nigeria, a South African boxer, a Kuwaiti artist, an Israeli medical intern (dead at 34), and, in Russia, two strange accidents, and all too many other "sudden deaths"





COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

el gato malo: predictions: data adulteration is the coming thing
when state sponsored agencies lose on level playing fields, they seek to slant the fields of the future. we must not let them.

much has been made (including by certain notoriously loquacious internet felines) of the emergence of a new class of distributed swarm sourced data analysts whose adjacent expertise has flowed into new fields cross pollinating them and challenging their assumptions and authority.

a great deal has been learned by a great many people.

while we have spoken at length about the learnings from the analysis, we have not delved overmuch into that which was apprehended on the other side of this ball. and i think we should, for the realizations of the challenged about these new challengers shall determine their responses and if you think recognition that the cloistered clerisies of academia and policy cannot win in a straight up fight is going to cause them to lay down their power, prestige, and prerogative and admit they were outmatched, boy are you in for a surprise. ...

.... the game has shifted and will shift further. the battle will be won or lost on data suppression and adulteration. 

you cannot outwit or out-analyze the bazaar from within the cathedral. the only solution is to keep the mass in latin and the holy words away from the congregants. i suspect data embargo and tampering (already rife) will become absolute gold standard operating procedure in short order. ...

.... the united states is the richest, most technologically advanced country in the history of countries and technological advancement.

can anyone tell me with a straight face that if we were determined to count election votes in real time with something approaching zero fraud or ineligible vote casting that we could not do so?

of course we could. and the fact that we don’t stands irrefutable accusation.

someone does not want it that way.

..... from alberta to albuquerque, the fix is in and the data, especially the US data, is being turned into trash such that it may not be accurately assessed by outsiders.





For two decades scientists have been quietly developing self-spreading contagious vaccines. The NIH funded this research, in which either DNA from a deadly pathogen is packaged in a contagious but less harmful virus, or the deadly virus’s lethality is weakened by engineering it in a lab. The resultant “vaccines” spread from one person to the next just like a contagious respiratory virus. Only five percent of regional populations would need to be immunized; the other ninety-five percent would “catch” the vaccine as it spread person-to-person through community transmission. This technology bypasses the inconvenience of recalcitrant citizens who may refuse to give consent. Its advocates highlight that a mass vaccination campaign that would ordinarily take months of expensive effort to immunize everyone could be shortened to only a few weeks.


Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:


..... On the EU, he said: "The European Union has completely lost its political sovereignty, and its bureaucratic elites are dancing to someone else’s tune, accepting whatever they are told from above, causing harm to their own population and their own economy."

He said there will be a "change of elites" in the West as part of the "revolutionary" shift initiated by the Ukraine war and the US-Europe overreaching: "Such a detachment from reality, from the demands of society, will inevitably lead to a surge of populism and the growth of radical movements, to serious social and economic changes, to degradation, and in the near future, to a change of elites," Putin said. ...



The speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, may have created the defining acronym for the emerging multipolar world: “the new G8”.

As Volodin noted, “the United States has created conditions with its own hands so that countries wishing to build an equal dialogue and mutually beneficial relations will actually form a ‘new G8’ together with Russia.”

This non Russia-sanctioning G8, he added, is 24.4% ahead of the old one, which is in fact the G7, in terms of GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP), as G7 economies are on the verge of collapsing and the U.S. registers record inflation.

.... The new G8, instead, “does not impose anything on anyone, but tries to find common solutions.”

... The intersection of the new G8 and BRICS + will lead Beijing to turbo-charge what has already been conceptualized as the Three Rings strategy by Cheng Yawen, from the Institute of International Relations and Public Affairs at the Shanghai International Studies University.

Cheng argues that since the beginning of the 2018 U.S.-China trade war the Empire of Lies and its vassals have aimed to “decouple”; thus the Middle Kingdom should strategically downgrade its relations with the West and promote a new international system based on South-South cooperation.

Looks like if it walks and talks like the new G8, that’s because it’s the real deal.



Russia is done with the West. The divorce is nearly complete. In the past few days we’ve heard from all major Russian leaders the same thing, “The West will play by our rules now.”

You can decide for yourselves whether Russia is writing checks they can’t cash, but in the words of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov telling the BBC bluntly, “We do not care about the eyes of the West.” Lavrov has always been the soul of politeness and discretion when dealing with European media.

His open hostility towards his BBC interviewer was not only palpable, it was hard to argue with. He followed that up with:

“I don’t think there’s even room for maneuver left anymore,” Lavrov replied.

“Because both [Prime Minister Boris] Johnson and [Foreign Secretary Liz] Truss say publicly: ’We must defeat Russia, we must bring Russia to its knees. Go on, then, do it.”

Russia’s leadership never talks in such openly blunt terms. It’s almost like Lavrov was channeling comedian Dennis Miller who used to say, “Feeling froggy, take that leap.” ...





Diogenes, one of the ancient world’s illustrious philosophers, believed that lies were the currency of politics, and those lies were the ones he sought to expose and debase. To make his point, Diogenes occasionally carried a lit lantern through the streets of Athens in the daylight. If asked why, Diogenes would say he was searching for an honest man.

Finding an honest man today in Washington, D.C., is equally challenging. Diogenes would need a Xenon Searchlight in each hand. ....

The Western media did everything in its power to give the Ukrainian defense the appearance of far greater strength than it really possessed. Careful observers noted that the same video clips of Russian tanks under attack were shown repeatedly. Local counterattacks were reported as though they were operational maneuvers. Russian errors were exaggerated out of all proportion to their significance. Russian losses and the true extent of Ukraine’s own losses were distorted, fabricated, or simply ignored. But conditions on the battlefield changed little over time. Once Ukrainian forces immobilized themselves in static defensive positions inside urban areas and the central Donbas, the Ukrainian position was hopeless. But this development was portrayed as failure by the Russians to gain “their objectives.”







Orwellian Fare:

Astore: Naked Power and Julian Assange

..... If you’re a journalist looking to make a difference, to shed light in dark corners, do you dare to take on the U.S. government and national security state given its persecution of Assange? Do you want to spend years in a maximum security prison, almost in total isolation, facing extradition to the U.S. for a bogus and nonsensical charge? The U.S. government’s persecution of Assange, though it’s meant to punish him and silence him, is really about intimidating and silencing other journalists. Who now dares to follow Assange’s example?

Power operates most freely, meaning most tyrannically, when it’s unconstrained by accountability. The more Assange suffers, the more America slips into authoritarianism. ....




A C.I.A. whistleblower languishes awaiting trial in a federal prison under inhumane conditions and almost nobody is paying attention. 

Joshua Schulte is a former C.I.A. hacker, one of those computer geniuses whose job it is to work his way into the computer systems of our country’s enemies in support of some of the most highly-classified operations the C.I.A. carries out. 

The government believes that Schulte was a malcontent who released to WikiLeaks in 2017 the equivalent of 2 billion pages of top secret C.I.A. data with code names like Brutal Kangaroo, AngerQuake and McNugget.


Fake Mass Graves of Natives in Canada, 'Cancel Culture' Cannibalizing Progressive NGOs, The French Left Awakens, Paul Mason vs. Grayzone, "Untouchable" Ariel Pink

My readers do not need another lesson in how media campaigns create narratives that have little to do with reality, but that have everything to do with implementing a political agenda. Every weekend at this Substack we digest news and opinion, dissect it, and try to figure out what is right, what is wrong, and just what the intention is when they try to feed us their bullshit. The average normie is far too busy to concern him or herself with critically analyzing every piece of news that lands on their screens, whether television, laptop, or mobile device. They cannot be blamed for this for the simple reason that we are constantly bombarded with news all day long. It is simply impossible to keep up with everything, and even more difficult to try and figure out what is actually happening.

Even here in this part of Europe, where people are born with the what may be the best internal bullshit detectors in the world, media narratives are absorbed and accepted quite often. For example ...

Mass media hysteria is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it’s as old as mass media itself. The difference today is the ubiquity of the news in our lives combined with the interactivity of social media. We now consume AND interact with the product itself, for better and for (usually) worse. Case in point: last summer’s hysteria over purported mass graves of Natives in Canadian Residential Schools. .........



CaitOz Fare:

Biden’s New Press Secretary Almost Calls Saudis A ‘Regime’

.... We saw these ridiculous mental contortions illustrated in particularly hilarious fashion in 2017 when Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones was asked at a press conference to square the Trump administration’s hand-wringing about the quality of Iranian democracy with its friendliness toward Saudi Arabia. Jones famously paused a full 20 seconds before he could even answer:

.... The US government must continuously subvert the will of the people in this way in order to successfully inflict the necessary violence and oppression for maintaining a global empire.

One might even go so far as calling it a regime.



The mainstream worldview is self-evidently bullshit. If our media and education systems were telling us the truth about the world and our “democratic” systems actually worked, our society would be arranged to serve the interests of the many rather than an elite few.

You can tell the mainstream worldview is bullshit just by looking at its fruits. We’re killing our biosphere to serve an economic system that’s creating greater and greater inequality while wars rage and nuclear brinkmanship threatens to wipe us all out and corruption rules the earth.

The world is as it is because the way the majority of people in the most influential nations think, act and vote is being continuously manipulated by the powerful, for the powerful. The mainstream worldview is just a giant bundle of power-serving lies and manipulations.

❖

Western liberal democracy is when corporations and bankers place all blame on the government, the government places all blame on the electorate, and the electorate absorbs all the consequences of the corporations, bankers and government without ever even getting a vote on any of the major decisions those entities make.

Ordinary citizens are assigned full responsibility for their social and financial struggles and their privacy rights are being eaten away. Powerful people are never held accountable for their immensely destructive decisions and they are protected by a wall of government secrecy.

Accountability and transparency should have a directly proportional relationship with power: the more power you have the more consequences you face for your actions, and the less privacy you’re entitled to. In our society it’s literally the exact opposite. It’s completely backwards.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Nicaraguan state television suggested that: 'If U.S. missile systems can almost reach Moscow from Ukrainian territory, it is time for Russia to deploy something powerful closer to U.S. cities...'


Stoller: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was put on the court because she was a big business friendly social climber. Her choices always reflected that.


Hedges: The gaping hole between the reality of what we have become, and the fiction of who we are supposed to be, is why spectacle is all the ruling class has left.


Soldo: For some time now, I’ve been asking myself and others why anyone would go into government in light of how much media scrutiny is placed on politicians, when you can simply go into finance or tech and make way more money while flying under the radar? There are many answers to this, ranging from suitability, education, and opportunity all the way to the psychological such as narcissism and hunger for power. We can speculate on the reasons all day long, but it is my contention that political office and public service is becoming, or has become, the domain of 3rd stringers, i.e. those who are not the best-in-class. The result of this situation is increasing incompetence in policy and governance.


Bardi: Imagine a university campus. Zoom your attention to one of the buildings. The, imagine a human figure running away from it, screaming while holding his head with his hands. Imagine him dashing out of the campus gate and disappearing in the fog, still running at full speed and screaming. That was me, leaving the University of Florence forever. I still had some time before mandatory retirement, but I couldn't take it anymore. The Covid regulations were the killing blow to an institution that had already become a monstrosity. For what I can say, the university (and not just in Florence) has been completely zombified: it keeps marching onward, clumsily, in search of students' brains to devour (if any are left).  



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Rigger: Talking Libberish

..... And what about even more nebulous ideas like “offence” - something that can also land you in legal hot water in the UK? If I’m a comic and 2 people in my audience of 100 find one of my jokes offensive, does that mean it was 2% offensive? In what objective sense is something offensive? This is the problem when we try to make laws based on subjective notions, on woolly jargon.

..... Even back in 1983 it seems that people were beginning to cast their net around more widely for ridiculous things they could gripe about.

Today, of course, the sheer number of things we are able to gripe about is mind-blowing. Many of these things are similarly ill-defined and nebulous but we are expected to take their alleged existence every bit as seriously as electromagnetism.

What in the ever-loving fuck do any of these terms really mean? How can they be assessed or measured? Here’s just a very few of them.....

... We’re awash, these days, in meaningless jargon. We’re not so much talking gibberish as gibbering talkish. It sounds like words, it sounds like something that has meaning - but as Eric Morecambe said to André Previn after playing piano “you’re playing all the right notes - just not in the right order”.



1. The Gospel of Progress
Ever since the archaic divergence of humanity from other hominids, our systems of tools and symbols have developed at an accelerating pace. We depend less and less on the physical capacities of our bodies. We operate more and more in the realm of information: data, words, numbers, and bits.

Quite naturally then, we have conceived an idea of progress that celebrates this development, and a destiny narrative that foresees its endless continuation. Its future is one where we integrate technology ever more fully into our bodies, until we become something more than just bodies. It is one where we immerse ourselves so fully in representation, that virtual reality becomes more compelling to us than material reality. The first is called transhumanism, the second is the Metaverse. ............


********** Greer: The Twilight of Empire

... Money. It’s what empires are all about. An empire is a wealth pump. Yes, I know, every empire has its public relations flacks who love to insist otherwise, rabbiting on about the wonderful benefits that everyone else gets from being subjected to the rule of the empire du jour.  If you believe them, I’ve got a cousin in Nigeria who just inherited a fortune and we’d be delighted to cut you in for a share. Whether it’s Virgil claiming that the gods predestined Rome to bring peace to the nations, Kipling babbling about the white man’s burden, or their forgettable American equivalents lauding the United States as the world’s policeman, they’re shoveling smoke. An empire is a system of unequal exchanges designed to pump wealth out of other countries for the benefit of one.

Not all those benefits end up in the hands of the ruling elite of the imperial nation, though it’s fair to say that a very large share of them do.  The current situation makes a good demonstration of this.  The United States is the third most populous country on the planet, after India and China, and its inhabitants make up about 5% of our species. Until quite recently, when the US empire began to unravel, that 5% of humanity got to use around a quarter of the world’s energy resources, about a quarter of its raw materials, and around a third of its manufactured products. That doesn’t happen because people in other countries don’t want these things. It happens because US policies, strictly enforced until recently by the world’s largest military, saw to it that things worked out that way. Again, that’s the nature of empire. ........................

I wonder how many people have realized, in fact, just how awkward a revelation the total failure of Biden’s sanctions has turned out to be. The US and its client states have slapped just about every economic sanction on Russia that they can think of; the result has been that the Russian economy is doing fine, but the economies of the United States and Europe are cratering. The unpalatable truth that has been revealed by this turn of events is that the “global economy”—that is to say, the structure that has been erected since the collapse of Communism to manage the flow of real and financial wealth from country to country—benefits the United States and its inner circle of client states, and nobody else. To Russia, and arguably to a great many other nations as well, it’s entirely parasitic: a means of pumping wealth out of their hands and into those of America’s and western Europe’s kleptocratic elites.

That matters, because now other nations have an alternative. That’s why India is eagerly cutting deals, not just with Russia, but also with Iran and influential regional players such as Vietnam; it’s why Russia itself has just signed a new set of agreements with Nicaragua, which include the right to base Russian troops and planes in that small but strategically vital Central American country, and why Iran is making agreements of its own with Nicaragua and Venezuela. It’s why the president of Mexico rolled his eyes at US demands and pursued his own nation’s interests at the expense of ours.  ....

As the American empire implodes and takes the imperial tribute economy with it, Americans will have to produce most of their own goods and services again. To say that we’re very poorly prepared to do this is to understate things considerably. ...



................. Fundamentally, the problem here is that people don’t critically look at issues that affect us. Rather, we have a spectrum of trust, that explains almost the entirety of political differences we see today: The centre-left has a high degree of trust in authority, the far-right has very little trust in authority. We don’t look at issues individually, we either trust that the authorities are correct, or we fundamentally distrust them and assume that whatever they come up with must be intended to make our lives miserable.


Cops are a right-wing force. What are the implications?

... But police departments were formed, not to solve crimes, but to “maintain order” in the immigrant-unrest and labor-resistance world of the 19th and early 20th centuries — a role they inherited from the infamous Pinkertons, thugs-for-hire from an earlier day. And they have remained a force of social repression — repression of unrest — ever since.



Satirical Fare:



WTF / WASF / Not Satirical Fare:

New York State, City Paid $200,000 for Drag Queens Reading to Kids at Public Schools, Records Show

... Since the beginning of this year, Drag Story Hour has organized 49 appearances in 34 elementary, middle, and high schools across the city. The group in May alone made $46,000 in public funds for its appearances at schools, festivals, and libraries.


Other [Sickening] Fare: 


“In the diary, the president’s daughter wrote that “showers w/ my dad (probably not appropriate)” might have played a role in her sex addiction as an adult, as well as being “hyper-sexualized [at] a young age” which allegedly involved another family member as a child, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.”



Pics of the Week:









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