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Sunday, June 26, 2022

2022-06-26

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

Economic and Market Fare:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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


Kelton: Inflation
Whodunit and what to do about it

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

Why?

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

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

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



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

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



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



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

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


Quotes of the Week:

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


Charts: 
1:




Bubble Fare:

Calm Before the Storm

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

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

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

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

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



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


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




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Canada To Spend Billions on NORAD So US Can Rule World

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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




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



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:




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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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




COVID Fare:

I've continued to come across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Joey Smalley (aka Metatron) and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut (on twitter); new additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk and Aaron Kheriarty; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts

Analysis:

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

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


Chudov: Depopulation of Taiwan

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

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

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

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


Must be the weather





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

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



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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



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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

❖

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

❖

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

❖

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

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

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

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

❖

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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



Other Fare:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Or does the end of Roe represent something very different?

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

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

Let me explain....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

America, fuck’yeah.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Quotes of the Week:

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

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






Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Pics of the Week:










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