Pages

Monday, August 1, 2022

2022-08-01

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

Economic and Market Fare:








The US Bureau of Economic Analysis published the latest US National Accounts data last week (July 28, 2022) – Gross Domestic Product, Second Quarter 2022 (Advance Estimate) – which showed that the US economy is now in technical recession – two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. After recording a contraction of 1.6 per cent in the March quarter in real GDP, the advance estimates for the June quarter show a further contraction of 0.9 per cent. Many commentators are, however, denying the recession narrative because they are pointing to the low unemployment rate (of 3.6 per cent). It is true, that the GDP figures are often revised and when the final, second-quarter estimates are available, they might record positive growth. But there is a puzzle emerging. We have long held the view (based on Okun’s Law – see below), that when GDP growth declines, the unemployment rate rises. This is a long-held stylised fact that has until Covid stood the test of time. But Covid has changed things and at present the US (and other nations) are experiencing a major slowdown in the growth of their working age population as a result of quite alarming rises in long-term disability as a result of the enduring impacts of Covid infections (and repeated infections). That has meant that unemployment rates are lower than they otherwise would have been as a result of worker shortages. On the one hand that is good for the employed. But, on the other hand, it is disastrous for workers who are now disabled. So the meagre fact that unemployment is low does not negate the conclusion that the US economy is now in recession, which has been deliberately created first by a massive fiscal contraction, and then, by the irresponsible conduct of the Federal Reserve Bank....



.... The powers that be say that you cannot call a recession unless the ‘wise men’ of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) do so and they have not yet.  For some unfathomable reason, the NBER economists have become the arbiters of an official recession and they take into account, not just GDP, but also all the other factors mentioned above. 

But the NBER always calls a recession in the long line of US recessions over the last century well after it has already happened.  And it’s worth noting that US recessions have happened just when people claim they are not happening and, most important, whether the Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates or not. ...



... That poses the question of whether central banks have any significant effect on the economy either to sustain growth and employment and avoid slumps; or to control inflation. That question has been debated through two new books that have recently been published or are forthcoming. ...

... And the empirical evidence refutes the claim by both Bernanke and Chancellor that the setting of interest rates is key, not profits.  Indeed, the US Fed itself concluded in its own recent study that: “A fundamental tenet of investment theory and the traditional theory of monetary policy transmission is that investment expenditures by businesses are negatively affected by interest rates. Yet, a large body of empirical research offer mixed evidence, at best, for a substantial interest-rate effect on investment…., we find that most firms claim to be quite insensitive to decreases in interest rates, and only mildly more responsive to interest rate increases.”  But they are not insensitive to the profitability of their investments. ...

... It’s the same story with longer-term economic growth.  The key to sustained long-term real GDP growth is high and rising productivity of labour.  Productivity growth has been slowing towards zero in the major economies for over two decades and particularly in the Long Depression since 2010.  US labour productivity is currently falling and at its weakest for 40 years. 

According to Chancellor, ultra low interest rates led to ‘malinvestment’ and thus low productivity.  It’s true that much of the investment made in the last 20 years has gone not into productive sectors and instead has been moved into financial assets, leading to stock and bond market ‘bubbles’.  But surely the reason for that is not artificially low interest rates, but low profitability on productive investment, now near all-time post-1945 lows along with productivity growth.


It will be the Fed’s fault if the economy crashes into recession



Walmart and its rivals resort to aggressive price cuts as high inflation hits demand for goods



Quotes and Tweets of the Week:

Mac: There are eight weeks until the next FOMC. In the meantime, the economy will be weakening as the lagged impact of these most recent rate hikes takes effect. Meanwhile economic reports which operate on a lag will continue to show elevated inflation and economic activity while the real-time indicators are collapsing. During this lag period, Wall Street will be doing everything possible to paper over collapse with their standard end of cycle chicanery. 

Tchir: Did we reach the Neutral Rate? I have seen some long diatribes about why we haven’t reached the neutral rate, at least not in this inflation environment, but we are closer to a long-run neutral rate than not. Parts of the economy have the risk of rolling over, so I suspect that we are done (or almost done) with tightening. I was a bit surprised that the Fed seemed to indicate that too, but it fits with my view on the path of rates so I’m not going to fight against what the “correct” neutral rate is and “around here” seems plausible.

...


Charts: 
1:




...



Bubble Fare:


..... Investors abandoned discipline and became believers:
Carried along by this immense tide of capital, many venture capitalists now admit their market was overcome by a race to invest at almost any price — though most like to claim their own funds were able to sidestep the worst of the excesses.
... As we wrote in 2017, recapping a Stanford paper, Fake Unicorns: Study Finds Average 49% Valuation Overstatement; Over Half Lose “Unicorn” Status When Corrected. Key findings:
A recent paper by Will Gornall of the Sauder School of Business and Ilya A. Strebulaev of Stanford Business School, with the understated title Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality, deflates the myth of the widely-touted tech “unicorn”. I’d always thought VCs were subconsciously telling investors these companies weren’t on the up and up via their campaign to brand high-fliers with valuations over $1 billion as “unicorns” when unicorns don’t exist in reality. But that was no deterrent to carnival barkers would often try to pass off horses and goats with carefully appended forehead ornaments as these storybook beasts. The Silicon Valley money men have indeed emulated them with valuation chicanery.


(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The absurdity of expanding fossil fuel use in a bill to prevent the catastrophic effects of fossil fuel use.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Shell, which recently made a record profit, is delighted with the “Inflation Reduction Act” that Joe Manchin has agreed to support. The company’s chief executive “praised the deal and highlighted its promise of new [oil and gas] lease sales to come.” Likewise, the head of ExxonMobil expressed approval: “We’re pleased with the broader recognition that a more comprehensive set of solutions are going to be needed to address the challenges of an energy transition.” (“Comprehensive set of solutions” meaning those that do not threaten fossil fuel industry profits.) “This is a bill that keeps the fossil fuel industry, and the country, in a very strong position,” Joe Manchin said. The Journal tells us that the new “climate bill” is in fact a “boon for the fossil fuel sector.” This is because:
Under the bill, the Interior Department would be required to offer up at least two million acres of federal land and 60 million acres of offshore acreage to oil and gas producers every year for the next decade. If they fall short, they wouldn’t be able to advance some permitting aspects of the wind and solar projects on federal land. It would be the first-ever required minimum acreage for offshore oil and gas leasing and significantly increase the acreage requirements for onshore leasing. 
.....



Global coal demand could reach 8 billion tons in 2022, matching a historic high set in 2013, and further growing in 2023, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a coal market update report published on Thursday.


Draft standards drawn up by the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market aim to tighten up a notoriously opaque sector.


Battery Recycling: The Next Big Challenge For The EV Boom


The Trash Mountains of South Asia That Threaten the Climate
Dumps, landfills and waste sites in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are huge emitters of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.


UK looking for storage site for world’s biggest stockpile of untreated waste, including 100 tonnes of plutonium





Other Fare:





The Yangtze sturgeon and Chinese paddlefish, known as "the last giants of the Yangtze" have been deemed extinct in the wild by the International Union for Conservation of Nature


“If mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” —E. O. Wilson
..... The IUCN Red List is widely considered the most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species. The risk of extinction indicated by an IUCN designation falls into one of seven primary levels:

• Extinct—beyond reasonable doubt that the species no longer exists.
• Extinct in the wild—survives only in captivity, cultivation and/or outside native range.
• Critically endangered—in a particularly and extremely critical state.
• Endangered—very high risk of extinction in the wild.
• Vulnerable—considered to be at high risk of human-caused extinction without further human intervention.
• Near threatened—close to being endangered in the near future.
• Least concern—unlikely to become endangered or extinct in the near future.

Species in the Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered categories are collectively described as ‘Threatened’.

..... A Rose by any Other Name

Everybody loves the monarch butterfly, but the milkweed that makes the butterfly’s existence possible gets no respect at all. ....

.... Death by a Thousand Cuts? Enumerating the Threats

Alarm bells have been ringing for years about the future of the migratory monarch butterfly. Year after year scientists wrestle with how to calculate the decline of a species difficult to count. At the local level, an Ontario farmer who has lived on the same property for several decades told me that today she sees very few monarchs in the same fields where they seemed to fill the sky when she first moved there. It’s a story often repeated.

.... For the present, however, the decline in migratory monarch populations is most generally tied to two primary causes: climate change and the impacts of herbicides and pesticides.



Fun Fare:


Pics of the Week:



Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

What Presidents Say Does Not Matter. It Is The Execution Of Policies That Counts.


He apologises for abuse while defending abusers




Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

Ishi Nobu: Eusocialism
Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed. ~ Chinese proverb

As long as people are as they are, the world must be as it is. ~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

Time is running out. The collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon. ~ English naturalist David Attenborough in 2018

The institution of democratic governance had an implicit responsibility: to create a citizenry capable of intelligent selection of public servants. That responsibility has not been met. Compulsory education regimes have not produced a sufficiently knowledgeable citizenry upon which a decent democracy depends. ...

... Worldwide, the situation renders the status quo untenable, and the future bleak indeed. Climate change is already disruptive; a trend that will startlingly accelerate within the next few decades. There is no reason to think that mankind possesses the intelligence or will to belatedly self-correct and avert its inexorable, self-made demise. That withstanding, a brief exposition on a curative polity follows.
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. ~ German physicist Albert Einstein
...



...... Currently, we are on the first track: Business as Usual track (BAU). In other words, in spite of the seemingly endless number of reports warning us of our predicament, society has not acted.


Much is riding on how Americans approach new development and managed retreat as the climate crisis worsens over the next decade.


Tverberg: The world’s self-organizing economy can be expected to act strangely, as energy supplies deplete

...... The issue causing the price conflict can be described as reduced productivity of the economy. The ultimate outcome of reduced productivity of the economy is fewer total goods and services produced by the economy. ... 

..... In the past, the growth rate of GDP has exceeded that of energy consumption. As the economy changes from growth to shrinkage, we should expect this situation to reverse: The rate of shrinkage of GDP will be greater than the rate of shrinkage of energy consumption. ...

............... Many parts of the economy are likely to find that the promised payments to be made to them cannot really take place.

............. Unfortunately, the physics-based approach I am using indicates that the world’s economy is likely to change dramatically for the worse in the months and years ahead. Economies, in general, cannot last forever. Populations outgrow their resource bases; resources become too depleted. In physics terms, economies are dissipative structures, not unlike ecosystems, plants and animals. They can only exist for a limited time before they die or end their operation. They tend to be replaced by new, similar dissipative structures.

While the current world economy cannot last indefinitely, humans have continued to exist through many bottlenecks in the past, including ice ages. It is likely that some humans, perhaps in mutated form, will make it through the current bottleneck. These humans will likely create a new economy that is better adapted to the Earth as it changes.


Depends on where from, what type of transport and how food is grown


Delusions of bovine sustainability

INDUSTRIAL CATTLE ARE SHODDY pieces of machinery. They demand an absurd amount of feed, water, and land; they get sick constantly; they shit everywhere—and to put a cherry on this putrid beefcake of evolutionary workmanship, the methane they’re constantly burping out is gassing the inferno of global warming.

An uncreative mind might look at such an animal and think that, perhaps, breeding and slaughtering it on an ever-expanding scale has the makings of catastrophe. But for a visionary, cattle offer an opportunity to fix the many, many failures of nature. Just look at the world-changing innovations that the beef and dairy industries have already brought us: consider the marvels of genetic engineering, the brutal efficiency of the factory farm, or the captive bolt pistol. Such developments helped the beast become a functional component of modern industry, but in this moment of profound ecological peril, beef must be more: it must become “sustainable.”

Thankfully, our top creative minds are on the case and already producing results. One winner of a recent Terra Carta Design Lab contest—presided over by Apple’s erstwhile head of planned obsolescence, Jony Ive, and monarch-in-waiting Prince Charles—to help find “credible and sustainable solutions to the climate crisis” offers a glimpse of the bright future cattle have ahead of them. Behold Zelp: a methane-oxidizing wearable designed to minimize bovine emissions. Because “eliminating the livestock industry is not a realistic solution,” Zelp will instead blunt its adverse effects on the biosphere.








...
...

Michael Mann blocked me on twitter:

I was responding to his tweet (in response to the article above about McGuire's book) that the new Manchin deal was "breakthrough legislation" that would help us "limit planetary warming to <1.5C":


QOTW:

holy shit, WASF:
Koonin: The impact of human influences on the climate is too uncertain (and very likely too small) compared to the daunting amount of change required to actually achieve the goal of eliminating net global emissions by, say, 2075…. I would wait until the science becomes more settled … before embarking on a program to tax or regulate greenhouse gas emissions out of existence or to capture and store massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.



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


In each age category there is a far smaller percentage of people dying from all-causes, relative to the unvaccinated population size.


...In all age groups (apart from 18-39 year olds), for the double jabbed, there is a higher percentage of deaths than the relative population size.


... To summarise, when looking at all-cause deaths the unvaccinated are dying at a much lower rate than their population size would suggest. Strangely, the same is true for double jabbed 18-39 year olds. The rest of the age groups in the double jabbed and single jabbed categories are dying at higher rates than their population size would predict.


Smalley: Deaths of Under 65s in the USA, 2020-21
Why is the "vaccine" year so much higher than the virus year and where is the declaration of a public health emergency?

Seven simple questions for the unenlightened.





Less jab gives you more bang now, of the undesired kind.

... “Nah, can’t be!” you say? “You zoomed in and picked a co-incidental period on purpose,” you say? I thought so too. Then I decided to zoom out for the bigger picture, all the way back to the “happy valley” of July 2021 when the optimism about the “safe and effective” “vaccine” was at its peak: ...

You can see that Israel and the UK vaccination pushes were not synchronized, but in both countries every “vaccination” drive has been closely followed by the “Covid-19” mortality bump.

... You can see that Israel and the UK vaccination pushes were not synchronized, but in both countries every “vaccination” drive has been closely followed by the “Covid-19” mortality bump.

What is remarkable in the last two mortality bumps is how much less “shots in the arms” it is taking to whip up a significant jump in “Covid-19” mortality. How much longer will it take until a “jab in the arm” becomes an outright lethal injection? It seems like we are closing in on that stage as we speak


A scientific scandal with huge implications for women's health is brewing and you weren't going to hear about it - until now.

TLDR: A paper was published in October showing how the mRNA vaccines could massively impact ovarian and breast cancer risk. Two scientists linked to the NIH and Pharma conspired to remove it from publication - putting a generation of women at risk. 





Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Berenson: The pilots union at a major US airline internally reports a 300 percent rise in long-term disability claims this year among its members, who are nearly all vaccinated.


Kunstler: All this does not even include the forthcoming attrition among the vaccinated. We have succeeded in disabling and destroying the immune systems of many millions of people with mRNA shots. They are going to get sick from all sorts of things. A lot of activities will stop working, including the medical industry, so many of the injured and dying will not receive care. In this late summer interim, American pharma says it’s ready to bring forth new-and-improved mRNA shots supposedly keyed to the latest emerging variants of the C-19 coronavirus. Pharma and its enablers in the NIH-CDC matrix actually have no idea what variants are coming — nowhere is nature more of a trickster than in disease organisms — and you can be sure that their new vaccines will be more shuck-and-jive.


....


CO-VIDs of the Week:

Video from Truth in Plain Sight.

Dr Richard Fleming is an American Medical Doctor, specialising in cardiology and has a law degree. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a Fellow of the American Society of Internal Medicine, he is a medical patent expert, has authored between 400 and 500 medical papers, and has sat on review boards of medical journals.

In March this year, he testified that:
  1. SARS-CoV-2 is a lab-engineered bio-weapon, funded by the US government, the result of gain-of-function research on the spike protein, making it more infectious.
  2. Safe and Effective treatments for the virus were suppressed by the US health regulatory agencies.
  3. Quarantining of healthy people is completely ineffective.
  4. The mRNA/RNA “vaccines” produced by Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen are bio-weapons delivering the same toxic spike protein as the virus but in loads up to 5 million times higher.
  5. The vaccinated are responsible for pressure-selecting variants (alpha, delta, omicron, etc.), prolonging the epidemic.
  6. The “vaccine” disrupts the natural immune system, making the vaccinated more susceptible to infection and disease.
  7. The “vaccine” damages red-blood cells and causes hyper-inflammatory and clotting that cause disease and death in its own right.
Watch.




Anecdotal Fare:

For all those who have "died suddenly" since January, 2021, many MORE have suffered grave and (it seems) lasting injuries, some arguably worse than death; and there's no end in sight


Berenson: Five physicians - four 50 or younger - have died in the Toronto area in the last two weeks

When I first started receiving emails that three physicians from a single health system in Canada had died in mid-July, I wondered if an Internet hoax had gone viral.

The odds seemed impossibly long. Doctors generally take good care of themselves.

But the emails that three physicians at Trillium Health Partners had died in a matter of days were real, not a hoax.

And they did not even include two more deaths of Toronto-area physicians since July 15. Those were both apparently cardiac-related deaths, including one of a 27-year-old woman - an extraordinarily rare event.

The count of dead physicians in the Toronto area in last two weeks now stands at five, four of whom were 50 or younger. One died of lung cancer, two of apparent cardiac collapse, and in two cases the cause of death has not been disclosed.

.... Still, this is a striking run of bad news in a very short period, especially coming just days after the fourth shot became available. More information would be welcome.

Instead, the hospitals are simply insisting the deaths are in no way related to Covid shots. “The rumour circulating on social media is simply not true,” Trillum - where three of the physicians worked - tweeted Wednesday. “Their passings were not related to the COVID-19 vaccine.”

The hospital where the fourth dead physician, Dr. Paul Hannam, offered a similar statement to the Toronto Sun. “North York General Hospital can confirm that the tragic death of Dr. Paul Hannam was not related to COVID-19 or vaccinations of any kind,” it said.

To which the only answer is: How can you be so sure? Hannam was a 50-year-old former Olympic athlete and marathoner who died during a run. Myocarditis and other cardiac complications are known side effects from the mRNA shots. Was an autopsy performed? Did he have any evidence of heart disease?




Pushback Fare:

I'm suing social media.

We’re all in a bit of a temperamental situation…while restrictions seem down, we know that they’re about to fucking explode into the fall and this is all driven over a complete bullshit narrative.

To date, I have been banned by 2x social median platforms, LinkedIn and Twitter, for spreading - Misinformation.

Welp.

It’s time to make them show their cards and I am 100% going to the mattresses!

For them to shun you from their networks because of an infraction, seems a little weak. If the information you share is provided by Government Sourced Information, is literally libel. ...

... It’s time we stop fucking around here.

We’ll be 2025 before this shit ends, unless we end it first and with the government… ......



COVID Idiocracy Fare:

Fenton: How Wikipedia defames and delegitimizes anybody raising concerns against the WHO narrative on Covid

He is a retired Computer programmer who has a PhD in English. But apparently that is sufficient to make him the ultimate arbiter of the ‘truth’ on Covid-19. He is the key member of a very small clique of Wikipedia ‘editors’ responsible for ensuring that any member of the public looking to Wikipedia for information on the many legitimate concerns about the ‘official’ covid narrative will find nothing other than smears against those raising such concerns. This clique act as ‘gatekeepers’ of the covid narrative, and have free reign to edit these personal pages. Not only do they insert complete lies, but they then delete any attempts to correct the lies and are able to block all attempts by others to provide corrections. The full story and how Alexbrn hacked Norman Fenton's Wikipedia entry is here.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:


It has always been about the economy. What is the use of hegemony without economic gain? It is like throwing a party and no one comes. Or, going to war for purely egoistical or ideological reasons (aka shared values).

What is even worse, is going to war and winning militarily, but discovering that the costs were horrendously too high, and the net results were pittance or negative – A Pyrrhic victory.

Throughout history, all empires and belligerent nations expanded for economic gain. More land to farm and exploit, wealth and resources to loot, and more people to subjugate and tax or enslave. This goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, passing through the Persian, Greek, Roman empires, and all the way to European colonialism in the past 500 years. Today, it remains the same although it has been disguised to appear docile and friendly, but, make no mistake, it is colonialism – economic neo-colonialism! The shills, however, will present it as development aid, economic assistance, modernization, democracy, human rights, modern values, and may even, masquerade it as improving the ‘Happiness Index’ of the colonized nations.

As such, most of the ‘exploitable’ world has been dominated and what remains is Russia and China, plus a few stubborn or poor nations here and there. Russia is simply too vast and rich not to be lustily desired and has been a target for centuries via direct belligerence or, more softly, via geopolitical ploys. To publicly temper this lust, pseudo-intellectual doctrines have been utilized to justify it; among which is the century-old Mackinder Theory of the ‘Heartland of the World’, which states that whoever controls Russia and its environs, controls the world. As for China, its unexpected spectacular rapid growth to the pinnacle of economic success now necessitates clipping its wings to bring it back into the obedient fold. None of the dominated nations were, or are, happy with their predicaments. Despite that, they are unable to shake off the yoke of neo-colonialism. ...



The next two weeks could be two of the most dangerous in the history of the United States because it appears Joe Biden and his clueless national security team are bumbling their way towards a showdown with China that is fraught with the peril of war. The Chinese Government now rejects the One China Policy that has been the foundation of U.S./Chinese relations for 43 years. CSIS boils it down nicely: When the United States moved to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and de-recognize the Republic of China (ROC) in 1979, the United States stated that the government of the People’s Republic of China was “the sole legal Government of China.” Sole, meaning the PRC was and is the only China, with no consideration of the ROC as a separate sovereign entity.

The United States did not, however, give in to Chinese demands that it recognize Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan (which is the name preferred by the United States since it opted to de-recognize the ROC). Instead, Washington acknowledged the Chinese position that Taiwan was part of China. For geopolitical reasons, both the United States and the PRC were willing to go forward with diplomatic recognition despite their differences on this matter. The Chinese are now unyielding on their claim of sovereignty over Taiwan. It does not matter any more that Washington threatens action if China takes any steps to impose its “sovereignty”, China is going to demonstrate its sovereignty. One way it may do this is to deny Nancy Pelosi and any other dignitary from Washington, DC from flying to Taiwan and setting foot on “Chinese territory” without the permission of Beijing.

The United States does not have an embassy in Taiwan. It has a consulate, which is subordinate to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. In other words, any official visit by a U.S. official must have country clearance from China. Got it? What makes the current situation so dangerous is that the Commander of US Forces in the Indo-Pacific region (aka INDOPACCOM) has ordered the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group to the South China Sea as a “show of force.” This is a deliberate act to demonstrate to the Chinese that they have no sovereignty over this territory. The Chinese reaction to this provocation is alarming:

“The Chinese Army urged citizens to “prepare for war” in a social media post Friday that garnered thousands of likes, according to the state-sponsored Global Times. Chinese officials have issued stark warnings of possible conflict should House Speaker Nancy Pelosi follow through with her promise to visit Taiwan in August, pledging a “forceful” response. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) 80th Group Army’s post received over 300,000 thumbs-up on China’s social media platform Weibo within 12 hours “amid high morale among Chinese soldiers,” the Global Times said. “We must bear in mind the fundamental responsibility of preparing for war and charge on the journey of a strong army,” the 80th Group Army posted in a comment that received 8,000 likes”, according to Global Times.


***** Lawrence: The imaginary war

What were the policy cliques, “the intelligence community” and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics war, a war with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on 24 February. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one.

Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant of what we saw as the Russiagate fiasco came unglued: Those who manufacture orthodoxies as well as consent are slithering out the side door.

I could tell you I don’t intend to single out the Times in this wild chicanery, except that I do. The once-but-no-longer newspaper of record continues to be singularly wicked in its deceits and deceptions as it imposes the official but imaginary version of the war on unsuspecting readers.

.......... long list of media lies......

Have you had enough of the imaginary war? I have. I read this junk daily as a professional obligation. Some of it I find amusing, but in the main it sickens when I think of what the American press has done to itself and to its readers.

... This is not a grinding war of attrition, as we are supposed to think. It has proceeded slowly because Russian forces appear to be taking care to limit casualties — their own and among Ukrainian civilians.


Russian Foreign Minister schools US leaders in political theory

If you’ve studied international relations (IR), you’re probably familiar with the “security dilemma”:

One state builds up its forces to increase its security. But other states, seeing this build-up from afar, feel less secure—and build up their own forces in response. Rinse and repeat. Let the process continue long enough and you’ll have a bunch of increasingly well-armed countries in a state of tension—perhaps escalating tension—even though all think of their contributions to this spiral as purely defensive.

You might think foreign policy makers—schooled, as they tend to be, in international relations—would keep the security dilemma in mind as they do their strategic planning. But according to Stephen Walt, a leading IR scholar, you’d be wrong. Writing in Foreign Policy, Walt says he’s “struck by how often the people charged with handling foreign and national security policy seem unaware of it—not just in the United States, but in lots of other countries too.”

Western leaders may really believe that NATO is, as they often say, a “defensive alliance” and that its expansion reflects no desire to attack Russia. Even so, Walt argues, they should understand that Russia will probably see things differently. That is the lesson of the security dilemma.



..... The Ukrainian government generally explains all this as a sign of Ukraine’s transformation into an ‘oligarch-free competitive European nation’. There are also other ways to explain these processes.

The first factor in this process is quite simple – the war is destroying the economic assets which formed the productive base of the Ukrainian ‘oligarchy’, namely, the Soviet industrial complex.

... The second factor is a mainstay in post-soviet Ukrainian politics – the presidential command, itself originally the product of one oligarchic clan directed against its opponents (Zelensky was in large part Kolomoisky’s weapon against Poroshenko), is now trying to centralize power in its own hands. ...

The broad context of this is the fact that wartime has economically weakened the oligarchs, while Zelensky and his clan have received enormous political and economic privileges, both domestically and from foreign sources. Naturally, they have decided to take advantage of their relative strength to centralize political and economic power.

....... If Ukraine has no big business left, having deindustrialized under the twin push of ‘anti-corruption’ (which doubles as anti-industrial policy, see my article on this) legislation and trade liberalization with the EU (free trade is generally held up as a panacea to statist corruption), then who is left in charge of the country? Anti-corruption ‘activists’ funded either directly by the West, its NGOs like Transparency International, or by the Ukrainian state budget, which itself survives largely thanks to western aid.

A situation where the anti-corruption organs have total juridical power is one where the ruling political class (and the ‘anti-corruption civil society’ which controls these politicians), clearly has 0 interest in a rapprochement with Russia, since its income depends on saying and doing what the West wants – being anti-Russian. Unlike the oligarchs, it has no industrial assets whose profit might be increased through access to Russian (or separatist-controlled Donbass) markets or raw materials. One ends up with a ‘Lithuanian scenario’, where the government make anti-China, anti-Russia decisions which actively harm domestic business, supposedly in the name of ‘civilizational values’.

…the destruction of the Ukrainian oligarchic class will mean that the most powerful capitalists in Ukraine will be foreign, western capitalists, who also have little interest in overseeing a Ukrainian rapprochement with Russia, since this means competition from Russian business, and possibly the protectionist ideology generally espoused by ‘pro-Russian’ politicians in Ukraine.

The current ‘de-oligarchization’ and the victories of ‘anti-corruption activists’ is hence not really something to celebrate. It signifies the finale in the death of the Soviet industrial complex and the victory of an unproductive political class whose income depends on foreign hand-outs and political decisions which contradict national interests.



Once condemned by Ukrainian officials and imprisoned for sadistic torture and the rape of minors, leaders of the notorious Tornado Battalion are free under Volodymyr Zelensky’s orders.

After banning virtually his entire political opposition, publishing a blacklist of foreign journalists and academics accused of advancing “Russian propaganda,” and ramming through a law exempting 70% of Ukrainians from workplace protections, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy has freed from prison fascist militants convicted of some of the most heinous crimes the country has seen since World War II. ...


...
...
...

likely fake, but funny nonetheless; parody best when it closely approximates reality:





Orwellian Fare:


In October 2019, Jake Sullivan, who became U.S. National Security Advisor in 2021, stated in an interview that the U.S. needed a clear threat to rally the world and play the role of saviour of mankind and that China could be that organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy. In the 2019 interview, he acknowledges that the problem was that people were not going to believe that China is a global threat, that their view of China is too positive and that the United States would need a “Pearl Harbour moment,” a real focusing event to change their minds, something he calmly stated that “would scare the hell out of the American people.”

According to Sullivan, from the same man who called for Libyan and Syrian military interventionism, American exceptionalism needed “rescuing” and “reclaiming,” not of course with actual qualitative actions that would earn one’s position as a model of true democratic governance with American citizens and the world, but rather through ever aggressive PR and media shame-based social conditioning, labeling whoever points out the clear hypocrisy of these statements as “threats to national security.” Actors like Sullivan have shown that they are willing to do anything to achieve that “Pearl Harbour moment,” even if acts of terrorism on their own people are required in order to paint their “enemy” as a monster in the eyes of their citizens. ...

... This is by no means a new strategy. Operation Gladio is a perfect example of how NATO conducted a decades-long secret war against its own European citizens and elected governments under the guise of “communist terrorism.” ....

... Jake Sullivan’s statement that we need a “Pearl Harbour moment” is nothing new.

In September 2000 a report titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century” was published by none other than The Project for the New American Century. In the report it is written (pg. 51):
“…the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Interestingly, within this same report, published by The Project for the New American Century, it is written (pg. 60):
“Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and ‘combat’ likely will take place in a new dimensions: in space, ‘cyber-space,’ and perhaps the world of microbes…advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
... As the Los Angeles Times article also observes, without 9/11 as their Pearl Harbor, their entire campaign against terror in the Middle East could never have been justified.

In fact, since the disastrous PR campaign of the Vietnam War, most American had become horrified at the prospect of entering any more foreign wars on the clearly false and hypocritical terms of bringers of “peace” and “freedom.”

9/11 changed all that.

... Pelosi’s airplane might indeed be shot down on her completely irrelevant and unnecessary trip to Taiwan, and if it is, don’t be surprised if it was the Americans themselves who are behind it, who have shown they are willing to do anything for that “Pearl Harbour moment.”





********** In The US You Can’t Witness An Execution If Your Skirt Is Too Revealing



Other Quotes of the Week:

Johnson: You got to give the New York Times and the Washington Post reporters credit for one thing–they are tenacious in the art of self-delusion. They report the news without understanding the implications and contradictions in their reporting...  Meanwhile, back in the United States, US military analysts are briefing the chain of command that Ukraine is coming apart at the seams. 


Kunstler: Who is surprised that the US government’s war on the American people is not going any better than its sponsored war in Ukraine? The only thing the government is really good at is covering up its crimes, which mainly requires them to do nothing — don’t investigate anything, don’t furnish documents to anyone, don’t answer official letters, slow-walk every required action, and otherwise dodge, duck, deny, deflect, and dissemble.


Peterson: Second: it is almost impossible to overstate the degree to which Canada’s international reputation has been damaged by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.


Bardi: A few months ago I decided to retire. Actually, I run away screaming from my university, and I never set foot again in my department afterward. And I do not plan to set foot in it again, ever. So, how is the life of a retiree scientist? It is a dream. Freedom from bureaucracy, paperwork, research reports, grant writing, attending meetings, being part of committees, all that. I don't have to spend the 1h 30' of commuting that I used to spend every day when I went to my office. To say nothing about not having to torture those catatonia-suffering creatures that go under the name of "students." I feel like a retiree executioner! 



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Thoughts on Navigating the Murky Grey Zones in Life

........... One of the most insightful things I ever heard from a colleague about splitting is that individuals often do it because they want to be able to characterize a large portion of people as being “bad“ so that they can feel better about themselves by being superior to those “bad“ people. This is very important to keep in mind when you observe individuals demonizing and belittling large swaths of people for highly questionable reasons.

To a large extent, I believe the media has been structured to create a lighter form of borderline personality disorder within the general public by discouraging the ability to appreciate the nuances in many issues and replacing this capacity with a tendency to default to splitting when confronted by any complex issue (and thus making it become an issue about one side or the other being right). I would argue all of this arises from the continual emotional agitation the media creates to polarize the public on each issue, how frequently it gaslights the public to deny what is clearly happening in front of them, and how it jerks the populace’s minds around so that over and over they find themselves being forced to support something completely at odds with what they were told believe in the recent past.

......... When you break it down, it is very difficult to be certain of anything, even things that we treat as unquestionable truths we base everything else upon (these foundational beliefs are commonly known as axioms). I have thought this through for a long time, and there are very very few things I believe with absolute certainty. 

..... Skepticism towards every aspect of reality, like faith, has always been an inherent aspect of the human experience. In truth, you need both, and whenever either one becomes excessive, problems emerge.


On dreaming our own dreams, rather than the dreams of Capital

......
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
The prolific fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin spoke those words as part of her acceptance speech for The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This part of her speech has lived on in the radical imagination—including in political slogans and leftist t-shirts, and it’s quite inspiring.

However, it’s taken a bit out of context.

Le Guin’s specific point was opposition to the growing corporate dominance over the publishing industry and the tendency of writers to shape their works for a sales strategy rather than to create as artists create. Despite being very rarely quoted, an earlier part of her short speech is much more powerful and deeply relevant to this question of leftism and reality.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.
.....


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)