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Wednesday, July 13, 2022

2022-07-13

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

Economic and Market Fare:

China Credit Growth Explodes To 4th Highest Ever In June... It's Still Not Enough



... The US Federal Reserve Bank released a FEDS Note yesterday (July 12, 2022) – Monetary Policy, Inflation Outlook, and Recession Probabilities – which gave us more detailed insight into what they expect the consequences of their irresponsible interest rate hikes to be.
....... 
5. “In our baseline case, we forecast increasing real rates, a narrowing policy gap, and a 35% recession probability by the end of 2023.”

6. If the Federal Reserve tightens more than expected at present, then they predict this will be “at the cost of a higher downside risk for economic activity, as the one-year ahead recession probability approaches 60% by the end of 2023”.

So the number crunchers in the Federal Reserve Bank are in no doubt as to what the Monetary Policy Committee is up to.

It is clear they know that the monetary policy changes are likely to force the US economy into recession with rising unemployment and poverty rates.

It seems unconscionable that such a policy stance would be taken when there is no certainty that the policy levers actually can influence the inflationary pressures other than oil prices (which will be responsive to demand shifts).



There is confusion among mainstream economists and policy-makers on whether the major economies are heading for a recession, or are already in a recession; or will avoid one altogether.  The majority view, at least in the US, is the latter.  This optimistic view argues that, while inflation rates are high, they will start to fall over the next year, enabling the Federal Reserve to avoid hiking its policy interest rates too much to the point where it could restrict investment and spending.  At the same time, the US unemployment rate is very low and the ‘labour market’ remains strong.  Such a scenario hardly suggests a recession.  Who ever heard of a slump where there is full employment?, the argument goes.

On the other hand, the pessimistic view is that the major economies are already in a slump that will be eventually recognized.  If we look at the models that measure various aspects of economic activity, the major G7 economies seem to have contracted in Q2 of this year.

..... Is it possible to have a recession and a tight labour market at the same time? US real GDP fell at a -1.5% annual rate in Q1 and looks like repeating that in Q2.  That’s a ‘technical recession’, as it is called.  But the unemployment rate is 3.6% near record lows and 380,000 jobs are being created each month, on average, over the past four months.

The extremely well-paid economists of the investment bank, Goldman Sachs, try to reconcile these divergent indicators.  It’s true, they argue, that some GDP tracking estimates now project negative Q2 GDP growth, which would trip the rule of thumb that two quarters of negative growth constitute a recession. But they point out that the indicators on employment, real personal income less transfers, and gross domestic income have all continued to increase. ...

But Jan Hatzius, chief US economist at Goldman Sachs, said there is “no doubt that a labour market slowdown is under way”, adding that “job openings and quits are declining, jobless claims are rising, the ISM employment indices in manufacturing and services have fallen to contractionary levels, and many publicly traded companies have announced hiring freezes or slowdowns”.  That suggests that unemployment is a lagging indicator in judging when a slump comes.


Blain: Markets Are "Distracted, Confused, & Not Seeing The Downright Obvious"

... Broadly, markets are distracted and confused, not seeing the downright obvious. I’m trying to figure out how vulnerable that leaves them to shock and awe surprises, the actuality of the macro-outlook, and the systemic consequences of policy mistakes. The only upside in such conditions is they do create price moves that translate into opportunities!

... There is an assumption the market knows best, and will set the right price of everything, based on the market being the collective intelligence of all participants. Except it is not. The market has no memory and certainly doesn’t remember making the same mistakes over and over again. The market is just a voting machine. It’s a form of popularity contest – whoever markets/plugs their ideas/positions best, wins!


where's that demand destruction you were predicting, Mark? here it is!!:

and here:

how about here?:



how about here?



and maybe here too?:

here?



there?





Quotes of the Week:

zerohedge: As humans actually spent some time over the weekend examining the jobs data from Friday .., the realization dawned that the labor market was in fact nothing like as strong as talking heads had proclaimed.


...
...

Charts: 
1:







(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Aronoff: Do Electric Vehicles Really Move The Climate Needle?



Other Fare:



Ever since Thucydides dismissed Herodotus, historians have differed about the past

The collective noun for a group of historians is an “argumentation,” and for good reason. At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past, attacking each other, debating the purposes and uses of historical knowledge, choosing different subjects to pursue, and arguing about how to pursue them. That is, in the infancy of their intellectual pursuit, historians were engaged in what we know as “revisionist history”—writing coexisting, diverse, and sometimes sharply clashing accounts of various subjects, accounts that challenged and sought to alter what had been written about them before. Accordingly, historians take it as indisputable that interpretive contests are inherent in all of their efforts to advance historical understanding. What’s more, historians are of the abiding conviction that robust, free arguments about the realities, significance, and meaning of the past should be cherished as an integral element of an open society like the one ours strives to be. Let me explain. ...


& the pic that won twitter on Monday:
 Webb:





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular [i.e. TPTB are Sociopaths and Criminals] Fare:

Video Hidden By US Navy For 6 Months Shows 34 Hours Of Spewing Jet Fuel In Hawaii



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


If you understand energy and its foundational role in making the economy happen, then you understand something that few others do. I’m not sure why this energy blindness exists, but it is as mysterious as it is widespread. Perhaps, the implications are just too profound for many people to really entertain?

After all, if energy is that important, and it’s now winding down, what does that mean for the long march of human progress and our own sense of what the future might hold? At a minimum, it means that things simply won’t carry on as they have been. No more endless growth. No more increasingly complex systems; heck we’ll be lucky to simply keep what we’ve got now operating and properly maintained.






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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


***** el gato malo: i see we have entered the "ninja level fear porn" stage of the pandemic
apparently, "omicron" is no longer scary enough

... this is the fear-porn industrial complex jumping the shark and imploding on itself. the whole “ninja” notion is so hilarious it’s hard to take seriously, but what i do think we need to take a serious look at are some of the claims being made here. because they are disastrously wrong.
The BA.5 subvariant of the basic Omicron variant appears to be more contagious than any previous form of the virus. It’s apparently better at dodging our antibodies, too—meaning it might be more likely to cause breakthrough and repeat infections.
i’m not seeing evidence that this is terribly true outside of the vaccinated. it’s not at all clear that BA.5 is inherently more contagious, more “ninja,” or more dangerous than early omi, itself a very mild variant vs delta or alpha.

it’s just increasingly vaccine advantaged because we antigenically fixated the herd with a leaky vaccine that trained intensely for narrow, non-sterilizing immunity. of course the virus did this. it’s the evolutionary gradient such a vaccine creates. no other outcomes was possible or plausible.

so yes, of course people are getting infected again and again. that’s what antigenic fixation does. it turns your immune system into a one trick pony unable to adapt to changing pathogens.

antigenic fixation/hoskins effect/OAS is a simple evolutionary process driven by strong immune imprinting such as that from narrow vector leaky vaccines.

you learn one response and use it preferentially to learning others.

we’ve never seen this at herd level/society scale like this before where so many all got the same non-sterilizing fixation. (sterilizing refers to prevention of contracting, carrying, and spreading virus)

this has created an unprecedented viral lab and evo-pressure and it’s going to work like this:


and once you are fixated, new adaptive responses are not learned. that means that this is 100% wrong:
Vaccines and boosters are still the best defense. There are even Omicron-specific booster jabs in development that, in coming months, could make the best vaccines more effective against BA.5 and its genetic cousins.
we already know it doesn’t work. ...

these new “variant boosters” are just marketing hype. they’re going to be approved without clinical trials based on being “known to be safe” and “eliciting biomarker response.” the FDA has already said so. they’re just going to see if the boosters generate some predetermined antibody response. of course they will. but what we do no know is:
  1. do those antibodies have any effect on current covid strains?
  2. do they provide any sort of sterilizing immunity? (doubtful as others have not)
  3. and if not, are they just going to drive more and deeper OAS/ADE? (likely because that’s what leaky vaccines do)
adding to this mess is the issue that boosters seem to be eliciting greater adverse event response than the original 2 dose course. ...

... this variant [BA.5] was selected for and preys upon the vaxxed and boosted. they are the ones getting it, spreading it, and suffering from it. it has become highly clear in nearly every sound data series. ...

... so, sorry beast, but it’s not the “unvaxxed” doing this. this is the predictable and inevitable outcome of generating herd level antigenic fixation with narrow, leaky vaccines. this is WHY we do not use them.


It's about a superantigen insert in the spike of SARS-2 that isn't in the spike of SARS.

This Substack is about another danger associated with the spike protein, and not just the viral spike. This danger is called a superantigen. A superantigen can activate all sorts of T cells non-specifically to induce hyperinflammation and cytokine storms, for example.

A beautiful paper is currently uploaded to the pre-print server OSF PREPRINTS (submitted in November 2021) entitled: “Differences in Vaccine and SARS-CoV-2 Replication Derived mRNA: Implications for Cell Biology and Future Disease”.1 This paper looks at the differences between SARS-nCoV-2 viral spike and the modified mRNA injection spike and asks the question: is the modified spike as, even more pathogenic, than the SARS spike? Basically.

The authors rightly point out in the conclusion that transparency and quality control are necessary aspects of any biological roll out into humans. They penned an extremely well-researched and articulated paper based on the potential devastating effects of codon optimization of the spike protein currently being injected into everyone, but that they are not able to publish it. For some reason. The ‘reasons’ being given to them sound very familiar to the ‘reason’ that Peter and I received in the context of our Myocarditis paper that is still in limbo. ...


IgG and C3 Deposition



As more and more provinces remove data on COVID, it’s difficult to actually bust down the stats to see exactly where we are at.

Of course, this is the intent - they don’t want us to know.

With that data that is still available is quite troubling and while I hope I am completely wrong, I don’t think we’ve actually seen a true pandemic…nothing like what we will be looking at in the Fall of 2022.

Let me explain. ...


On protecting our youngest peoples from our government.

e.g.:

... In conclusion we have produced experimental data that show that carbon dioxide content in inhaled air rises on average to 13,000 to 13,750 ppm no matter whether children wear a surgical or an FFP2 mask. This is far beyond the level of 2,000 ppm considered the limit of acceptability and beyond the 1,000 ppm that are normal for air in closed rooms. This estimate is rather on the low side, as we only measured this after a short time without physical exertion. Decision makers and law courts should take this into consideration when establishing rules and guidance to fight infections.

Eisenstein: Pandemania, Part 3
On lies and systemic deceit

..... Some of the lying was deliberate. But the outright corruption, the fabricated studies, the cover-ups, and the overt censorship are only the visible tip of the iceberg of deceit. They are easy to expose. Much more dangerous is the submerged bulk of the iceberg: the systemic confirmation bias, paradigm protection, publication bias, funding bias, scientific groupthink, political groupthink, tendentious framing of questions, false confidence, and self-delusion.

Thus it becomes difficult to disentangle deliberate lies from systemic deception. It is hard to fathom, that a system can perpetrate profound deceit when only a very few of its functionaries are consciously lying. ....

... What masquerades as a fact-check is actually a hand-waving exercise to explain away an inconvenient fact. Is it an actual lie? Well, sort of. I don’t think the fact-checker consciously thought, “OK, the claim is true, so let me try to obfuscate that as best I can.” Probably he or she thought something like this: “We all (except for a few crackpots) know that the mRNA vaccines are safe, effective, and necessary. Therefore the excess mortality must be caused by something else.”

A strongly held ideology acts as an interpretive filter. Ideologues uncritically accept and vigorously propagate any data that fits their narrative. They ignore, dismiss, or hold up to intense scrutiny any data that contradicts it. There must be another explanation. Further study is needed. It couldn’t be true. We’d better keep it quiet in case it causes vaccine hesitancy. The cumulative effect of this bias is the system lies to us. Spokespeople and public health authorities, trusting the integrity of the system, voice these lies. Some are doubtless deliberate liars, but even if none of them were, the effect would be much the same. In fact, they are all the more effective as liars when they speak with sincere belief.

... I still think it is important to expose the outright lying, fraud, and cover-ups. I applaud the many writers here on Substack who do that, such as Jessica Rose, Toby Rogers, Eugyppius, Intellectual Illiterati. Steve Kirsch, Naomi Wolf, Alex Berenson, Bad Cattitude, and Tessa Lena. If they did not point to the visible tip of the iceberg, we might not know an iceberg were there.

Because they believed systemically-generated lies, the authorities may be genuinely surprised when finally, as is happening now, reality invades their narrative pseudo-realities. Those of us who stood outside those pseudo-realities from the start (because we doubted the integrity of the system) are not surprised at the flood of data on excess deaths and falling fertility pouring in from around the world, especially given plausible mechanisms of harm and actual examples of vaccine injury from our circles of acquaintances.

Now our skepticism is spreading fast among the general public. 


Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Toby: In a just world, El Gato Malo would win the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his epidemiological work.




CO-VIDs of the Week:

********** 2 1/2 minute vid:
...

******** 5 1/2 min vid, but even just the first minute gives a pretty good idea


Pushback Fare:


America’s Frontline Doctors member Dr. Bret Barker, DNP, FNP, RN is suing MedPage Today and its Director of Enterprise & Investigative Reporting Kristina Fiore for defamation after Fiore wrote an article Dr. Barker says is riddled with disinformation. Dr. Barker is author of Sold Out Souls:Sars2-COVID-19, Simple Truths Ignored and CEO of Nuremberg 2.0, an organization dedicated to medical accountability and holding responsible medical professionals who harm the public in the name of COVID-19. In May, Fiore penned an article titled, “Should Doctors Worry About ‘Nuremberg 2.0?’ — It’s a ‘completely misleading application of the concepts of the Nuremberg trials.’”

Fiore first led readers to believe that Nuremberg 2.0 is about the Nuremberg trials and not the Nuremberg Code, which was developed in response to the medical experimentation perpetrated by the Nazis as revealed in the Nuremberg trials. The Code contains 10 tenets dedicated to human safety and dignity, the first of which is that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.



COVID Corporatocracy Fare:

How Pfizer Won the Pandemic, Reaping Outsize Profit and Influence


On the same day as the OECD meeting, the governments of 21 African countries quietly embraced a vaccine passport system, which will apparently link up with other global systems. 

.......... The Real Agenda

Now, almost half of Africa’s 54 countries are doing the same. But to what end? As I mentioned earlier, a vaccine passport system offers little to no hope of controlling transmission of the virus for the simple reason that the associated vaccines offer scant if any protection from transmission. As has become increasingly clear, vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, once infected, transmit to others at similar rates.

Perhaps there is another agenda at play. Interestingly, when Togo inaugurated its vaccine passport system, its Minister of Digital Economy and Transformation announced that the move was not just about public health; it was about furthering the digitization of the country’s entire economy ....

If vaccine passport systems are made a permanent feature of the global legal landscape, it will presumably mean that anyone who is not up to date with their vaccine schedule will not be able to cross international borders in the future. And that would essentially mean the end of two fundamental ethical principles underpinning modern medicine: bodily autonomy (the right to make decisions over one’s own life and future); and bodily integrity (the right to self-ownership and self-determination over one’s own body). In other words, if we ever want to travel again we will no longer have any say over what goes inside out body.

All this for the sake of non-sterilizing vaccines that offer very little protection against transmission or infection of COVID-19 and whose safety profile is looking increasingly suspect.


Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:


After a month ago Russia began offering passports to Ukrainian citizens of the pro-Russian separatist republics in the Donbas region, Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a hugely controversial decree ordering that "all citizens of Ukraine" be given "the right to apply for admission to the citizenship of the Russian Federation in a simplified manner."



A quietly released study from the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner [See Here pdf] looking into allegations of war crimes conducted during the Ukraine -vs- Russia conflict, specifically looked into allegations of Russian military targeting a nursing home facility in the eastern region of Luhansk. 

What the UN investigation revealed was that Ukraine military soldiers had intentionally used the nursing home as an active base to launch military strikes against Russian forces. The Associated Press was forced to reveal, “Ukraine’s armed forces bear a large, and perhaps equal, share of the blame for what happened in Stara Krasnyanka, which is about 580 kilometers (360 miles) southeast of Kyiv. A few days before the attack, Ukrainian soldiers took up positions inside the nursing home, effectively making the building a target.”

The issue of the Ukraine military, intentionally and with purposeful forethought, using civilian locations to embed their military units, highlights the inherent dangers associated with western propaganda during the conflict. In fact, the effort to create civilian casualties seems more purposeful as a strategy to gain western media support and create stories that can be used to advance sympathy toward Ukraine, even if it means putting their own civilians in harm’s way.



... Russia is playing its cards very close to its vest. While the MOD briefings provide a handy laundry list for tracking the kinds of losses the Ukrainians are suffering in men and materiel, Russia is not telling the full story of the devastation they are unleashing on Ukraine’s military. But the goal set by Putin–i.e., demilitarization–is being realized. Up to this point Russia has not targeted the command headquarters of Ukraine’s military in Kiev. If the U.S. and NATO persist in ramping up the weaponry they send to Ukraine, Russia has the ability to hit the top level command posts. If Russia does this they will likely kill and wound U.S. and other NATO officers. Russia has avoided launching such an attack, but if U.S. supplied weapons continue to kill civilians in the Donbass Russian patience may reach its end and they will send a devastating message.



CaitOz Fare:

Political False Dichotomies: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

You may vote and debate freely on any issue which does not affect the functioning of the empire. When it comes to how money, weapons and resources move around the world, however, you suddenly find that your votes don’t matter and your position has no mainstream representation. They’ll let you argue until you’re blue in the face over whether or not you can have an abortion or whether minorities should have civil rights; they might even let you vote on it. But things like military expansionism and neoliberal globalization and deregulation are off limits.

The empire relies on false political dichotomies like Democrats vs Republicans to keep everyone fighting over issues which don’t affect the functioning of the empire so the machine can trudge onward uninterrupted by the local riff raff. That is the entire job of those parties.

The mainstream media exist to keep everyone spellbound by those false dichotomies on the level of discourse and debate. They manufacture culture wars which split the populace in half over an issue which doesn’t affect the empire, then continually feed into that debate.

The Bernie/AOC/TYT “populist left” and the Trump/Tucker Carlson “populist right” factions are there to lure parts of the population who get a little too curious about the raw mechanisms of empire back into the political false dichotomy so they stop asking unauthorized questions.

The entire political/media class exists for this purpose: not to help people, not to fight for civil rights, not to create a well-informed populace so that democracy can function, but to keep the grubby little mitts of the unwashed masses far away from the true levers of power. That’s their whole entire function.


Other Quotes of the Week:

John Pilger: “I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.”






Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Why our society has gone insane and how it can be fixed?

... Many of you have most likely noticed, our society appears to be going insane. While the current flavor of insanity is a bit different than anything that has come before it (which I believe is due to the amount of readily available information exceeding the capacity of the average human brain to process), what we are experiencing now is by no means the first time a collective insanity has gripped society. ...


deBoer: Education Doesn't Work 2.0
a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps

Click through to the tweet and you’ll see in the thread that learning to play an instrument, learning a second language, and playing sports have no cognitive or educational advantages either. (The professor behind the thread rightly notes that these things are good in and of themselves, which I’ve been sure to stress in the past myself.) Because of fundamental difficulties in researching education, correlation is constantly mistaken for cause - that is, students who are strong or weak in educational metrics will also non-randomly be associated with things we might want to study as causative, such as learning to play chess. When we get high-quality randomized research, we very often see results like the above, that the association is not causative and that the variable has no effect. I have been saying this for ten years, and it’s a dominant theme of my first book: in education research, if you just keep betting on the null, you’ll never go broke. Put more simply and sadly, nothing in education works.

The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another. ...



... Schools are no less criticized today - and for the same thing. They’re all promoting the same set of ideologies based on CRT, gender theory, climate change and so on. What is striking these days, particularly in the case of gender theory, is that the kids are encouraged to be different, to stand out from the crowd, to ‘discover’ themselves and their alleged ‘gender identity’, and diversity, at least when it comes to skin tone and gender, is promoted as a wonderful thing.

What is not acceptable is any diversity whatsoever in how one is supposed to think about all of these various things.

I’m a big fan of diversity. I worked for a decade at a university in a country where I got to meet and talk with people from all over the world. It was bloody brilliant being able to interact with people from so many different cultures and with so many different perspectives. I loved it.

But if someone tries to restrict perspective, to tell me “this is the way you MUST think about this”, I’m going to tell them to fuck right off.

... But one other thing really set the old bullshit meter into hyperdrive. ...

..... And we’ve seen what happened to JK Rowling for merely suggesting there was something fundamentally important about biology. She was denounced as a “transphobe”, or worse, for writing an extremely compassionate and well-reasoned piece on the issue. No deviation from the ideology ‘norm’ allowed here - despite celebrating and promoting ‘queer’ (the Q bit in the alphabet soup) which is all about deviating from the ‘norm’.

It’s the standard playbook - denounce your opponents as monsters, without addressing any of their concerns, however legitimate.

It’s very familiar. During a faculty meeting at Evergreen College when Bret Weinstein asked for evidence of the alleged systemic racism that was rampant on campus he was told that “even asking for evidence of racism is racist, with a capital R”.

Even asking for evidence of vaccine efficacy is anti-vaxx, perhaps?


[Not] Satirical Fare:

Karma hits Wimbledon - Djokovictory
The tennis competition is won by a Russian and an Unvaccinated player.



Pics of the Week:



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