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Sunday, August 14, 2022

2022-08-14

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

Economic and Market Fare:

Danny Blanchflower and Mark Blyth: Have central banks overcooked their response to the rising rate of inflation?

Like everyone else it seems, the Bank of England is really worried about inflation. There is no denying its seriousness, especially for low-income households, which the UK has generated an abundance of over the last 40 years.

But is the supposed cure, a stiff set of interest rate rises, worse than the disease?

The logic behind rate rises is that making the credit of the nations’ poor more, while they are already struggling with food and fuel bills, will make them in the long run better off.

If that sounds absurd, it’s because it is. What makes it slightly less absurd is the rider that if we don’t do this people’s expectations about inflation will become ‘unhinged,’ and they will ask for wage increases to compensate for their inflation losses.

And if they do that, we will end up with higher and higher inflation, which will make them even worse off. Onward, upwards, to hyperinflation and beyond! So to avoid that we need to make a sufficient number of them unemployed (hard landing) or just a bit poorer (soft landing).

For this story to be plausible, inflation must be, not just as Friedman had it, always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It must be always and everywhere be an acceleration prone ever-present danger. But is that the case? ....

... The question then is where will inflation go? Up to a permanently higher plateau seems historically extremely unlikely. To the contrary, it does seem that a lot of prices around the world are tumbling, including oil, food, timber, fertiliser, computer chips and second-hand car prices along with the cost of shipping freight. ....



.....
III. Conclusion
Long COVID is associated with significant physical, cognitive, and psychological impairments that interfere with activities of daily life. Alongside their effects on health status and quality of life, long-term symptoms of COVID are likely to limit work capacity as well.

My evidence of labor market effects is not conclusive. Regressions in the Household Pulse Survey are consistent with negative effects of long COVID on individual employment rates, but these results are potentially biased by unobserved confounders. Long COVID has likely contributed to the stalling out of the trend decline in disability rates, but its quantitative importance is difficult to assess. ...


The Chinese economy has been wracked by rural bank defaults and boycotts over mortgage payments. In the first half of this two-part blog post, I will explain these events and what they reveal about the health of Chinese markets. In the second part, I will discuss some of the crisis’s systemic implications.



Charts:






Bubble Fare:

  • The average vacancy rate in mainland China is 12.1 per cent, according to BRI, meaning millions of empty units could flood the market
  • Now the property boom is over, the unoccupied homes are beginning to feel like a burden for their anxious owners


(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Supporters of cutting carbon emissions have long struggled against advocates for climate-change adaptation strategies.

.................. “Unchecked, climate change is unadaptable, like, we will so fundamentally change the landscape of the planet, that it would be impossible.”






For the past two decades, China has built up a powerful position in Canada’s critical minerals and mining sector, with little oversight from Ottawa



Other Fare:

In all its baroque and sometimes cruelly overbred forms, the dog is a paramount symbol of both human hopes and foibles


A hidden link has been found between two seemingly unrelated particle collision outcomes. It’s the latest example of a mysterious web of mathematical connections between disparate theories of physics.



Gregg studies animal behavior and is an expert in dolphin communication. He shows how human cognition is extraordinarily complex, allowing us to paint pictures and write symphonies. We can share ideas with one another so that we don’t have to rely only on gut instinct or direct experience in order to learn. But this compulsion to learn can be superfluous, he says. We accumulate what the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “dead facts” — knowledge about the world that is useless for daily living, like the distance to the moon, or what happened in the latest episode of “Succession.” Our collections of dead facts, Gregg writes, “help us to imagine an infinite number of solutions to whatever problems we encounter — for good or ill.”

“If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal” is mostly fixated on the ill, or the way that humans insist they are improving things when they are ultimately mucking them up. There is already a stuffed shelf of books about how we aren’t as smart as we like to think we are, or how our smartness can lead us astray: David Robson’s “The Intelligence Trap,” Leonard Mlodinow’s “Emotional,” books in behavioral economics by Daniel Kahneman or Dan Ariely. But Gregg makes a bigger case about how human intelligence has deformed the planet as well. He explicitly ventures into the conflict between optimists like Steven Pinker and pessimists like the British philosopher John Gray.



Vids 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:

Charting The Course

A lot of overt injustice and criminality is apparent in the western world recently, and notably more so than before 2020, I'll add. I think everybody notices. People have noticed this trend for even longer, I think, but could lay blame somewhere, like "Trump" and keep on going. That hasn't slowed down. We are as politically polarized as I have ever seen. The shortages everywhere make everybody possessive and defensive. This explains so much unfairness and cost-shifting and blame-shifting onto other people or groups. Still, the corrupt economic system, increasingly unreliable, is still a system. It seems inevitable that the western financial system will overtly break in the way that the USSR broke and that China had The Cultural Revolution to place blame when its economy could no longer reliably meet basic needs.

 The western financial system has to break sometime, because it is based on growth of energy and resource depleting economy, with production of pollution, on a finite planet, but it is breaking now because growth went negative a few years ago despite every trick that could be played.

  The name of the new game is "excuses to wield absolute power". We got "Pandemic", which played out. "War in Ukraine" has played out in the US, but it still seems to work on a lot of Europeans in the summer. Many will die miserably this winter unless the narrative changes soon. The US is trying "War against China" out, which should be versatile and durable, and should work for Chinese elites, too, as long as it doesn't get too realistic, but it has to be "realistic".

  Surplus Energy Economics looks at our current economic cusp between  managing by scrimping and borrowing to  homelessness because you can't keep up payments on anything. This has been a very long time coming. ...

In our current setting the alternate global trade and finance regime is being laid out, and it's mechanisms agreed in treaties and meetings. The driving force to it will not merely be cutting out the skim of western finance, but the opportunity to default upon $US denominated debt, essentially all foreign debt. That is the payoff to take that big of a risk. That is also the death knell of the western financial system, when it happens


Mexico’s president has a mandate for radical change, but this change must be negotiated within a context of limits produced by the neoliberal period itself.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government has, up to now, two principal axes that guide official decisions: 1) the conception of corruption not as an individual crime but rather as a specific political economy and 2) a neo-developmentalist and nationalist view of the role of the state in the economy.

In AMLO’s view, neoliberalism turned the country into a kind of reverse rentier state, in which members of the government did business with a network of contractors that drained public funds through a series of mechanisms—from outsourcing government functions, to offering services for more than they’re worth, and, in the most extreme (but common) cases, creating a parallel structure of ghost companies to “win” government contracts and produce fake receipts in the service of tax evasion. The vision of the current government is that these networks of intermediation—clientelist brokers, but also NGOs that received government funds, trusts (fideicomisos), or simply private companies hired out by the state to carry out specific services, among others—should, in general, be targets of intervention, seen as opaque and redundant and a key bottleneck facilitating budgetary capture.

AMLO’s government has combated these practices, reorganizing and recentralizing public spending to make cuts “from above” (what he calls “republican austerity”), as well as creating an aggressive Financial Intelligence Unit that investigates white-collar fraud. Additionally, he has eliminated tax condonations obtained through lobbying by large corporations. These efforts have produced, in a country with tax collection rates below the OECD and LAC averages, an increase in tax collection from top earners without resorting to a reform of the current tax structure, essentially a de facto progressive tax reform.

The government’s development strategy consists of channeling funds to a series of programs like no-strings-attached cash transfers to students, senior citizens, and disabled people, among others; a professional internship program for young adults; plus guaranteed high prices and subsidies for small farmers. The new or expanded slate of cash transfer programs operates under a decidedly different logic than that of the previous decades, moving away from social programs that were micro-targeted and means-tested, to a universal and right-based approach. While the cash transfer programs are targeted to broad sub-groups, the conditions for accessing these programs are minimal (basically being a member of that group is enough). The programs have now been adopted into the Constitution, cementing their framing as universal rights rather than focalized “hand-outs.”

The series of infrastructure “mega-projects” led by the state (and cancellation of private-led ones like the Texcoco airport) also mark a move away from the neoliberal era: the Felipe Angeles airport, a refinery, the Maya Train on the Yucatán peninsula, a transportation corridor on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec connecting the Gulf of Mexico with the Pacific Ocean, a project to build rural roads and a reforestation program, attest to this. In addition, all these projects are framed around pre-neoliberal ideas about the importance of generating public-works jobs. ...



Biosphere Fare:


.... “Born too late to explore the world, and too soon to roam the stars, but just in time to have microplastics in our blood.

..... What’s happening, with climate, pathogens, plastic, and far more is classic “sorcerer’s apprentice” stuff: We have power we can’t control, and when we use it, we do harm.

This is why even if all the “best time ever to be alive” books and articles were right (a questionable assertion, but it is true for many people), they’re wrong in a larger sense — it’s like saying, “Man, I’m staying warm!” as you burn down your house. Once you’re finished burning your house, you’re screwed. Except what we’re burning down is the environment which keeps us healthy, fed, watered, and protected from temperatures too cold or hot to survive




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

No more vaccine hesitancy in the formerly apprehensive population?



and bolsters concerns about mRNA and cancer

............ 
get worried.

this is a very big deal because the spike protein produced by these vaccines is FAR more dangerous in a great many ways than the spike from covid itself and this is even more true today when compared to more moderate variants like omicron.



........ So to be fair, yes, websites can definitely be updated as data and information is updated. However, when the information on said websites are the basis of global mandates with the goal to inject non-effective and not proven-safe experimental gene therapy products into an entire species, Houston, I think we have a serious problem.


Want to know why nobody is seeing any deaths from the vaccine? It's because they aren't looking! Duh! These two 90 minute interviews will explain it in detail.

Executive summary
  • Medical examiners aren’t assessing that the vaccines can cause death because they aren’t doing the proper tests. They don’t order the tests because they don’t want to know.
  • The CDC isn’t requesting that these tests be done either. They don’t want to know.
  • Family members could request the tests be done on the tissue samples of those who are deceased. They don’t want to know the truth either (it’s too painful).
  • The doctors know the vaccine killed people, but they won’t write it in the death certificate because they don’t want to be fired, lose their hospital privileges, and lose their license to practice medicine. So they shut up too.
  • Here are two videos that provide evidence in great detail about all of this corruption. It’s truly astonishing.
  • NOBODY WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT.

The tests to assess whether a death was caused by the COVID vaccine

Dr. Cole recommends Dr. Burkhardt’s protocol for autopsy. ......



When you experience a pandemic due to a new virus and wish to administer a vaccine to people in an effort to reduce the impact of this virus on the population, you need to take the long term impact of this vaccine on the evolutionary trajectory of the virus into consideration.

... If you look at the current situation, it’s obvious that the vaccines haven’t just failed, but rather, through their failure have created a situation in which an effective vaccine is now impossible too. Genetic diversity of this virus has increased so dramatically that attempting to vaccinate people against any particular strain will just cause another strain of this virus to infect us instead.

... And so in that context, I feel like giving a warning once more: The smallpox vaccines are not going to work to suppress this monkeypox outbreak on their own. And if in fact monkeypox manages to become yet another virus that establishes itself in our species, then you will ultimately come to find that widespread vaccination with the currently available vaccines makes the evolutionary trajectory of this pandemic worse too.

.......... But as you might have figured out by now, the stupidity is always worse than it looks. The US has insufficient doses of this vaccine for every dude who wants a shot, so they came up with a new solution to that: They’re going to split the dose in five parts and inject it less deep into your arm, so they can vaccinate five times as many people.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

lolol:
Fauci: "What I symbolize in an era of the normalization of untruths and lies and all the things you're seeing going on in society, from January 6 to everything else that goes on, people are craving for consistency, for integrity, for truth."



CO-VIDs of the Week:

Pfizer could be bankrupted by this lawsuit
Brook Jackson, former Regional Director of Operations for Ventavia Research Group, turned whistleblower



Pushback Fare:

It’s Time to Do Something about America’s Failure to Recognize Children's Rights

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare disregard for the health and well-being of children in America. From prolonged school mask mandates to school closures, to canceled activities and sports, the least at-risk group of people for a severe COVID outcome shouldered the most restrictions, and still are in many counties and cities. ...



COVID Conspiracy Fare:

Chudov: Karl Lauterbach is EVIL and NOT Just Stupid
Lying about his vaccine status means he does NOT believe in vaccines any more

.... This is the first time when our suspicions of our health leaders being evil, and telling us to do what they are refusing to do themselves, have been confirmed without a shadow of a doubt. ...



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:






Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told the Wall Street Journal that Washington has rejected traditional diplomacy, and in the absence of a great leader, has driven the world to the precipice of war over Ukraine and Taiwan. Kissinger previously courted controversy for suggesting that Kiev abandon some of its territorial claims to end the conflict with Russia. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” Kissinger said in the interview


Patrick Lawrence: So Far As I Can Make Out
Patrick Lawrence explores how the truth about Ukraine has turned into a recipe for anger and contempt from the Western media.

So far as I can make out, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing their war against the Russian intervention. So far as I can make out, the AFU has been losing it more or less from the start of hostilities on February 24. So far as I can make out, the Ukrainian forces are heading toward a decisive defeat with ever mounting momentum. So far as I can make out, they grow increasingly desperate as this outcome becomes more evident, their conduct increasingly condemnable.   

I should not have to begin my sentences on this topic with “so far as I can make out.” But so far as I can make out, I must—as must all who make the effort to understand events on the ground in Ukraine as they are.

If the Ukraine conflict has plunged the world into a geopolitical crisis, as I think it fair to say, it is not the only crisis it has precipitated. American media were in crisis well before Russian troops and artillery crossed Ukraine’s eastern frontier, but the war that has since proceeded has caused our newspapers and broadcasters to inflict damage on themselves that I begin to think is irreparable....


Russia Buys 1,000 Drones From Iran and Expands the Level of Strategic Cooperation





Orwellian Fare:




Was Trump holding classified material? Was he being careless with this information, perhaps to the extent of endangering national security? I doubt that very much. A few boxes of files (mis)appropriated by Trump, perhaps in his usual careless manner, hardly pose a threat to America’s existence.

I’m much more concerned about the heavy-handed use of the Espionage Act against a former president, even a president I think was a chimp, and the precedent it sets for the future. Are we now going to see the FBI and other law enforcement agencies sent against political opponents in openly partisan attacks? ...



**** Kunstler: Gestapo the Steal

To America’s political Left, serving its masters in the runaway deep state, reality itself must be portrayed as “baseless,” as in nothing to see here, folks. Is it any wonder, then, that half the country has gone mental. The reality they don’t want you to see is that the intel-and-surveillance agencies of our Republic have taken on a rogue life of their own as a dominant “fourth branch of government,” and that some time ago they embarked on a crime spree against anyone threatening their operations.

That would include especially target number one: Donald Trump. For a masterful explication of how this amazing clusterfuck developed, I commend you to The Conservative Treehouse website where the writer who styles himself as “Sundance” put together a four-part report on how the original sin of RussiaGate metastasized into the stage-four cancer of institutional necrosis that culminated in this week’s raid on Mar-a-Lago.

The gist is: it turns out that the president does not have sole authority, in practice, to declassify and release government documents. With the rise of the security state, many new procedures have been erected within that massive labyrinth to prevent it or slow-walk it. The most effective has been to make the president himself a target of, or a material witness in, drawn-out investigations. That was the exact purpose of the Mueller exercise. Any exculpatory documents released by Mr. Trump — for instance, the complete unredacted text exchanges of FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — could have been used to hang an obstruction of justice charge on the president.

Mr. Trump adroitly avoided that trap, and many other legal pitfalls the deep state laid for him, and might have won reelection but for the well-organized ballot fraud of 2020. But the epic blunders of “Joe Biden” are giving Mr. Trump, and the movement behind him, a pretty good shot at routing the incumbent regime. Doing so, first in the 2022 midterms and then in the 2024 presidential election, portends a now quite visible effort coming to dismantle that reckless, unelected “fourth branch” of government. So, the intel-and-surveillance agencies are fighting for their lives — and the actual humans in charge must be keenly aware of their criminal liabilities.

Despite all attempts to disable him in office, Mr. Trump, as president, got to see an awful lot of classified material, including all the evidence of Hillary Clinton’s Russia Collusion hoax, abetted by the FBI, the DOJ, CIA, and DOD, plus all the lawless shenanigans that took place in the FISA court. A lot of it was assembled when, late in the game, Mr. Trump was finally able to appoint Directors of National Intelligence he could trust — Ric Grenell and then John Ratcliffe — who wrested many documents out of the foot-dragging agencies. Further maneuvers by artful Attorney General William Barr — the appointment of John Durham as Special Counsel and his drawn-out investigations — kept Mr. Trump from releasing any declassified RussiaGate material ever since. The catch was: he still had bales of that evidence in his possession among the personal papers he took with him from the White House.

Now, it also happens that in March of this year Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in Florida against Hillary Clinton and many entities and persons who abetted the construction of RussiaGate. ....


Did you know: All Former Presidents get a Federally Funded Office, with staff, security clearances, and SECRET SERVICE protection?

My new favorite source on all this: Mike Davis. Former Chief Counsel for Nominations, U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and (fascinatingly) Law Clerk, Justice Gorsuch.

This tweet stunned me today:
Office of the Former President
With staff.
And security clearances.
And Secret Service protection.
And secure facilities (SCIFs) for classified records.
Even if Trump had classified records, they were protected.
Period
All Presidents take records when they leave.
They don't pack their own boxes. ...

 

In 1987, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the President doesn't have to get permission from Congress or bureaucrats to declassify.

The Office of the Former President is very secure.

Hillary Clinton-never a President-may have been foreign hacked.

Garland is a political hack

It seems likely now that the Mar A Lago raid happened because the FBI and DOJ wanted to know what was in “the binder,” pertaining to details of FBI agents crimes during “SpyGate.” ...







CaitOz Fare:


..... I don’t know about you, but to me this warning is much, much more ominous coming from a bloodsoaked swamp monster than it would be from some anti-imperialist peace activist who was speaking from outside the belly of the imperial machine. This man is a literal war criminal who, as a leading empire manager, helped to unleash unfathomable horrors all around the world the consequences of which are still being felt today.

.... So Kissinger remains an unapologetic warmongering psychopath. But if he hasn’t changed as a person, what has? Why is he now cautioning against US aggression and warning that the empire has taken things too far?

Well, if Kissinger hasn’t changed, we can only surmise that it is the US empire itself that has changed. Its behavior is now so insane and illogical that it is making a 99 year-old Henry Kissinger nervous. 

... The empire’s departure from the Henry Kissinger iteration of murderous madness to its new form of insanity appears to have begun around the turn of the century, when the influx of neoconservatives into the White House combined with the jingoism which followed 9/11 to usher in an era of interventionism and military expansionism of such brazenness and recklessness that many from the old guard balked.

... Henry Kissinger is warning about the dangers of US warmongering not because he has gotten saner, but because the US war machine has gotten crazier. That we are now hurtling toward confrontations that don’t appear rational to someone who has spent the majority of his life watching the mechanics of empire from inside its inner chambers should concern us all. When you are talking about brinkmanship between major world powers, especially nuclear brinkmanship, the last thing you need is for one of the parties involved to be acting erratically and nonsensically.

We need de-escalation and detente, and we need it yesterday. If you’re too hawkish for Henry Kissinger, you’re too motherfucking hawkish.


*********** All Our Systems Are Built To Elevate Viciousness

.... The US empire is able to dominate the world exactly because it has “the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.” Whenever I lay out my evidence that the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth, I’ll get someone conceding that this is true but arguing that the US only behaves that way because it is the most powerful. Any other government with the power of the United States would behave with the same amount of viciousness or worse, they argue.

And I always tell them that they’ve got it exactly backwards. The US isn’t uniquely vicious because it is the world’s most powerful government, the US is the world’s most powerful government because it is uniquely vicious.

The United States put an exclamation point at the end of the second world war by dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan, not because it needed to (it didn’t), but because it wanted to intimidate the Soviet Union. It then immediately launched into a succession of new wars and strategic operations of astonishing viciousness with the goal of eventually becoming the global dominator. It achieved this at the fall of the USSR, after which it immediately instituted a policy of working to ensure that no rival superpowers ever develop and began working toward “full spectrum dominance” of the land, sea, air, and space. All of the major international conflicts of our day are the direct result of these policies.

None of the people driving the imperial power structure which rules over us are in their positions because of their wisdom or kindness. Oligarchs get to the top of their corporate and financial ladders by being willing to step on whoever they need to step on to get ahead. ...

... The world will never know peace as long as war is profitable. The world will never know health as long as sickness is profitable. The ecosystem will never thrive as long as ecocide is profitable. We will remain ruled by tyrants for as long as our systems elevate tyranny.

To have a healthy world, we’re going to need systems in place which elevate health instead of viciousness. Until then the gravitational pull of those systems will continually steer us toward dysfunction. Hoping we can move toward peace and harmony without changing those systems is like stepping off a cliff and hoping you don’t fall. ...



Other Quotes of the Week:

Bates: We are both blessed and cursed by the genes that make us herd animals. There is no way to switch off those genes but there is a way to keep them from disuniting and destroying us. We could elevate the order and scale of our definition of tribe, for example.


el gato malo: if it helps you sleep better at night to tell yourself that you have not been entirely captured by a crony corporatist system bent upon using the vast coercive apparatus of state to not only plunder you but erect and codify law and ethics to glorify doing so, well, have at it.



Pics of the Week:





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