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Thursday, September 29, 2022

2022-09-29

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


Economic and Market Fare:




.......... So credit helps capitalist production to continue even when profitability is falling but only “up to a certain point”, after which “credit accelerates the violent eruptions of this contradiction — crises — and thereby the elements of disintegration of the old mode of production.”   In other words, the level of credit now becomes debt that acts as a burden on further expansion and even triggers crises.  If the gap between inflated financial prices and profits in the rest of the economy is large enough, a financial collapse can precipitate a full-blown recession.  All of a sudden, credit dries up.  When credit is needed the most, financial institutions are too frightened to lend it. As Rosa Luxemburg once argued, “after having (as a factor of production) provoked overproduction, credit (as a factor of exchange) destroys, during the crisis, the very productive forces it created.”

But as Guglielmo Carchedi puts it: “the basic point is that financial crises are caused by the shrinking productive base of the economy. A point is reached at which there has to be a sudden and massive deflation in the financial and speculative areas.  Even though it looks as if the crisis has been generated in these sectors, the ultimate cause resides in the productive sphere and the attendant falling rate of profit in this sphere”.

.................... The OECD wants to blame the impending recession on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Putin, but the world economy was already heading into a slump just before the COVID pandemic broke and the recovery after the COVID slump was already petering out in 2021 before the Russian invasion.




Feeble politicians have condemned the working class

........ It’s truly a sign of the feebleness of Europe’s politicians that despite the fast-approaching cliff, no one can bring themselves to state the obvious: that the sanctions need to end. There’s simply no moral justification for destroying the livelihoods of millions of Europeans simply to school Putin, even if the sanctions were helping to achieve that aim, which they clearly aren’t.


did NOT expect that!:
New Home Sales Unexpectedly Soar With Second Biggest Increase On Record


DID expect something more like this:

and this:







And that means inflation has peaked and will be headed down in the months to come.

Inflation as measured by government indices (e.g., CPI, PCE Deflator) is a lagging indicator of true inflation. True inflation is defined as the loss of purchasing power of a currency. Right now that is just not the case: the dollar is soaring against nearly every currency in the world and virtually all commodity prices are collapsing.  Don't pay attention to inflation; pay attention to sensitive market-based prices—they tell you where inflation is headed

The Fed was very slow to see the inflation problem which showed up in surging M2 growth in 2020, and they are being very slow to see that inflation fundamentals have improved dramatically this year.

Chairman Powell has it all wrong: the way to kill inflation is not to kneecap the economy, it's to reduce the supply of money and increase the demand for it by raising interest rates. The Fed has already succeeded in doing that!  There's no reason at all that we need a recession to get inflation down. In fact, a growing economy can actually help to bring inflation down by increasing the supply of goods and services. I just don't see the Fed continuing on the inflation warpath for very much longer. ....

............. Bottom line: Argentine M2 is growing by leaps and bounds—70% a year at last count, whereas in the US, M2 is flat. The US is on the cusp of disinflation, while Argentina is on the cusp of hyperinflation. If higher unemployment were necessary to bring inflation down, Argentina would be suffering from deflation by now.


Vid of the Week:








Quotes of the Week:

Blain: Kwarteng’s response to the mayhem? “I don’t comment on market movements.”
Fair enough. When you know nothing and people suspect you are an idiot it’s best to stay quiet so as not to confirm it.




Charts: 
1: what an utter load of B.S.; is this what passes for analysis at BofA? has everyone lost all semblance of critical thinking ability?
FFS!




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Bubble Fare:

********** Hussman: Now Comes the Hard Part

.... At the 2000 market peak, a broad range of reliable valuations implied negative estimated S&P 500 total returns for over a decade, as they did in 1929, and as they unfortunately do today. This is what a decade of zero interest rate policy has set up for investors.

.... Keep in mind that periods of hypervaluation are not resolved in one fell swoop. To imagine otherwise is to minimize the discomfort, uncertainty, and alternation between fear and hope that the collapse of a bubble entails. The way that bubbles unfold into preposterous losses – 89%, 82%, 50%, 55%, and I expect this time between 50-70% – is through multiple periods of decline and even free-fall, punctuated by fast, furious “clearing rallies” that offer hope all the way down. By the time investors experience the second or third free-fall – and we haven’t even experienced the first one yet – the psychology of investors is not “this is the bottom” – but rather, “there is no bottom.”

.... As I emphasized during the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses, value is not measured by how far prices have declined, but by the relationship between prices and properly discounted cash flows. The market does not care how speculative investors have been. It only cares that every seller finds a buyer, and every buyer finds a seller. Equilibrium can be a brutal constraint in a hypervalued market that has shifted toward risk-aversion. When price-insensitive buyers and speculators want “out,” it can a long way down for prices until value- and yield-conscious investors want “in.” There’s your collapse. ....................



......... At this point in 2008 the Fed was ALREADY easing:



...... The S&P 500 is now testing the 200 week moving average, which historically has been a critical bear market level. Below that level, the last two bear markets accelerated both in % decline and duration. And then investors were informed far too late that the economy was officially in recession. Which is similar to now when economists are pretending the economy is not already in recession. 


(not just) for the ESG crowd:



An effort that began 70 years ago is poised to propel the country to middle-income status on a wave of green energy.


The rise in electric-vehicle ownership could overload the electric grid unless charging becomes a daytime activity.



Sci Fare:




Other Fare:






... The bank has been telling its employees that "worsening market conditions mean a greater need for in-person collaboration," ..

The company is implementing the new policy effective October 3. It'll expect that its principle dealmakers are in the office from Monday through Thursday


Of all the endless questions children and mathematicians have asked about infinity, one of the most fascinating has to do with its size.


National Public Radio began as a scrappy institution featuring the voices of average Americans. Today it’s a sterile, inoffensive corporate product that is produced, funded, and consumed by a narrow demographic of highly educated liberals.

NPR is a problem. Good and proper leftists who read Current Affairs may already realize this. “Of course. NPR (Neoliberal Propaganda Radio) is a bastion of establishment groupthink and orthodoxy that gives cover to imperialism and corporate capitalism.” By contrast, readers on the Right who find themselves consuming Current Affairs may have an equally disdainful but entirely different critique. “Of course. NPR is an elitist liberal propaganda cult that serves as a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, is openly hostile to any conservative voices, and ought to be defunded!”

Well, you’re both kind of right, and both kind of wrong. 

NPR, originating like PBS from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was originally envisioned as an ad-free public service to all Americans, standing as a supplement to privately owned commercial media and which would do the reporting that others did not. Yet, like much other media, NPR has become a partisan news service with a sterile, professional tone that belies an underlying allegiance to a very narrow range of political viewpoints that are largely inoffensive to those in power. Today, NPR is a product stuffed with advertisements. It receives relatively little in government funding and is mostly paid for by corporations and a small percentage of its listeners who come from a very specific demographic: white, well-educated liberals. NPR’s shift in funding and ethos means the outlet has come to exhibit some of the worst pathologies found in the commercial mass media. ....





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”


Regular Fare:


New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest liberal leader to call for an international alliance to censor speech. Unsatisfied with the unprecedented corporate censorship of social media companies, leaders like Hillary Clinton have turned from private censorship to good old-fashioned state censorship. Speech regulation has become an article of faith on the left. Ardern used her speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly to call for censorship on a global scale. Ardern lashed out at “disinformation” and called for a global coalition to control speech. After nodding toward free speech, she proceeded to lay out a plan for its demise through government regulation: ...





There are a number of videos circulating on the web that show angry white people screaming at Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to “Go back to where you came from!” It takes a special brand of stupid for, say, a Texan living in a town with a name like Llano located in Llano County to tell a Mexican or Mexican-American to “go back to where they came from.” For when you’re in Texas—a different spelling of the Spanish Tejas—in a county named Llano, which means plain or flat in Spanish, and in a town also named Llano for its flat ground, and you find yourself yelling at someone named Garcia or Gallegos to go home, you might be the one with the problem.

........... It’s one thing to live with this inherent contradiction of enjoying the fruits of low paid immigrant labor while trying to thoughtfully sort out our immigration issues, it’s quite another to go full nuclear bigot. And these last few years have produced a bumper crop of bigots in the United States.



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


..... So it turns out that under patriotic freedom-loving levels of CO2, the kind of level that satan-worshipping globalist elites want to prevent, fish become stupid! Well that’s weird, why would that be? Probably for the same reason humans become stupid when you crank CO2 up to 1000 parts per million. The real question we’re dealing with is not: Will we become dumber in the future? No my friends, the real question is: Have current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already turned us into drooling morons?

We have serotonergic neurons in our brain that measure carbon dioxide concentrations in blood. Today at 420 parts per million, those neurons will spend our entire lifetimes never measuring concentrations that are “normal”. Normal for us is 280 parts per million, that’s what we had for the past 10,000 years. In the period before 280 parts per million was normal, about 200 parts per million was normal.



Endemic 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 [almost?] everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
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); later additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk & Charles Rixey & Aaron Kheriarty; and newest additions Meryl Nass and the awesome Radagast; and Spartacus is on substack now!!; 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 Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and... of course Heather Heying and Charles Eisenstein often bring their insight and wisdom to the topic as well... and if Heying's substack isn't enough, she joins her husband Bret Weinstein at their DarkHorse podcast ....
but, in any case, check out those sources directly as I will my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts



This is the most important article I ever wrote, because it cracks open the plandemic nut. Perhaps more appropriate, it lances the pandemic boil so all can see/smell the putridness inside.


Pharmaceutical Hegemony Vs Scientific Integrity and Public Health

“I have slowly and reluctantly concluded that contrary to my own initial dogmatic beliefs, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine is far from being as safe and effective as we first thought.”

So writes Dr. Aseem Malhotra, in the first of his two important papers out this week. Aiming, in this first paper1, to “gain a better understanding of the true benefits and potential harms of the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) coronavirus disease (COVID) vaccines,” he walks the reader through a careful and concise analysis, providing the evidence which contributed to his changing his mind 

Changing one’s conclusions based on new evidence or analysis is one of the most critical things that scientists do. But it is not what most people calling themselves scientists are now doing. In a short video interview that was released just as the papers were published, Dr. Malhotra was asked if he worries about the blowback that will come from being an mRNA vaccine whistleblower. He answers without hesitation. “For me, what’s most important is my duty to patients, and to scientific integrity, and to the truth.”

Would that everyone wearing the mantle of science or medicine acted this way. If they did, we would be living in a very different world.

Vaccines are simultaneously one of the great advances that Western medicine has ever made, and are not the solution to every problem. Even the best tool isn’t the right one for all situations. Some situations call for a different approach.

Furthermore: labelling something as a particular kind of tool doesn’t make it one. The Pfizer product that is labeled a Covid vaccine does not deserve to be called a vaccine. It doesn’t behave like any vaccine that has come before, and it’s not effective at doing what other vaccines do. It doesn’t, in short, belong in the category. Therefore, those who would call mRNA-vaccine skeptics anti-vaxxers are wrong.

As I have said elsewhere2, I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m a trad-vaxxer. I like my vaccines to substantially reduce my risk of infection with the target disease, and also to reduce the risk that I will transmit the disease to others. And I strongly prefer that they’re free of adjuvants. The mRNA Covid “vaccines” fail on all counts. 

In his first article, Malhotra analyses the highly questionable benefits of these vaccines (obscured from public view in part by Pfizer’s monkeying with their own clinical trials); and also assesses their risks, in which he includes both an overview of known adverse events following vaccination of individuals, and excess deaths at the population level after the vaccines were rolled out. Malhotra also points out some of the falsities we were fed (even while those of us questioning the party line were the ones being accused of mis-, dis- and mal- information). The falsities include, for instance, ....



A British doctor, Aseem Malhotra, has just had a two part, peer-reviewed paper published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance. The aim of the paper was to gain a better understanding of the true benefits and potential harms of the mRNA Covid vaccines. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 in full by clicking on the links.

Dr Malhotra. a cardiologist by trade, was originally a strong Covid vaccine advocate. He volunteered in a vaccine centre, was one of the first people to be double dosed and appeared on morning television to encourage everyone to get vaccinated. He was surprised and concerned at vaccine-hesitant patients when they asked about ‘anti-vax’ propaganda.

That was until, sadly, in July 2021, his father suffered a cardiac arrest and died. His father had been the former deputy chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) and honorary vice president. The 73 year old gentleman was extremely fit and active and heart scans from a few years earlier had revealed no significant problems. Dr Malhotra was shocked to read his father’s post mortem which found that two out of three of his major arteries had severe blockages.

Aseem couldn’t explain the post mortem findings and became more concerned in November 2021 after reading a peer-reviewed abstract in Circulation Journal. In the study, the mRNA vaccine was associated with significantly increasing the risk of a coronary event within five years from 11% pre-mRNA vaccine to 25% 2-10 weeks post vaccine.

He began to question his father’s death and wondered whether the Pfizer vaccination he had received six months earlier could have contributed in some way. After six months of critically appraising the data and speaking to eminent scientists, he reluctantly concluded that, contrary to his own dogmatic beliefs, Pfizer’s vaccine was far from being as safe and effective as first thought.

During his reassessment of the Covid vaccine he recalled a conversation with a cardiologist colleague who decided against vaccination due to his low personal risk and concerns about short and long term harms. His colleague was particularly alarmed that, during the trials, there had been four cardiac arrests in the vaccine group but only one in the placebo group.

Next, Dr Malhotra assessed the 95% efficacy claims. ....

.......................... The paper continues to look at institutional corruption and erosion of public trust, the failure of regulation, biased reporting in the media and censorship of legitimate scientific debate.

A hard hitting, yet sensible paper which should be read by everyone, especially doctors who lost their critical thinking skills over the last few years.


And – details on these test results being withheld from the public

A small but groundbreaking study (available here) has been released at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, demonstrating that trace amounts of COVID-19 vaccine mRNA were found in the breastmilk of lactating women as soon as one hour after vaccination.



A new preprint from NIH and NIAID authors released on the 27th September confirms that spike protein translocates to the nucleus. This was denied by every single COVID vaccine (gene therapy) advocate to date.

More importantly this paper totally vindicates Jiang and Mei who were forced to retract their completely correct paper under political pressure from Eric Freed of the very same NIH, the funders of Moderna Inc. 



One of the most important skills for intelligent people to develop, one that I sadly never managed to master myself, is to never show the back of your tongue. It’s a skill that academics and people working within government bureaucracies tend to be good at. Testosterone causes honesty in men. A honest man will show you the back of his tongue, he’ll tell you what he truly thinks is going on.

One of the tendencies you’ll find on the left is that the smarter people don’t speak out against their own side’s pet projects, they just silently don’t go along with them: They don’t neuter their children, they don’t live in “vibrant” neighborhoods, etc. There’s a general absence of hypermasculinity among the modern left, so doing one thing and saying another is the norm.

And if you wonder how the vaccination project comes to an end, it happens in the same manner. There’s no honest admission that this was a mistake. There’s not enough testosterone circulating in decision making circles for that. The people in academia and government bureaucracies tend to have the digit ratios indicative of low testosterone exposure in the womb. The classical male pattern of high prenatal testosterone exposure doesn’t get you very far in modern Western society outside sportsball, the military and the drug trade.

Consider Monica Gandhi, as the typical example of an academic who just won’t show the back of her tongue. She knows more than she is telling you. A few months ago, she called for extending the delay between the first shot of the COVID vaccine. It goes without saying, this is kind of pointless: You won’t find anyone who is still unvaccinated and dumb enough to sign up for these shots.

It’s indicative however of what she comprehends: If you got these first two shots and the period between them is relatively short, your body ends up stuck with decreased breadth of the immune response, meaning it sucks at dealing with the Omicron variants. How long are you going to be stuck with this poor immune response? Heaven knows. What’s clear is that she is worried. She is worried that a mistake was made.

And now Monica Gandhi is back, with a new recommendation. If you remember that smart successful academics don’t show the back of their tongue, then what she is saying is pretty easy to translate: Stop vaccinating. She doesn’t explicitly say “stop vaccinating”, she has to say it in a manner that doesn’t contradict the narrative. So what she says is: “Wait six months after the most recent booster or infection.”

It doesn’t take a genius to understand what this means: It means you stop vaccinating. It’s a way of no longer vaccinating, without saying that you’re no longer vaccinating. With the exception of some total shut ins perhaps, there’s nobody out there who has had three or four shots of these vaccines, who manages to go six months without getting infected. If you stop vaccinating within six months of infection, you stop vaccinating. It’s as simple as that.

The six months rule would give every Twitter blue check the perfect valid reason not to get another dose of science-juice, without suffering cognitive dissonance. “No, the reason I’m not getting my next shot is not because of those side-effects that knocked me out last time, it’s because I’m following CDC guidelines!“ ......

In Denmark they’re less subtly backpedaling: You’re not getting this shot if you’re under fifty and they even admit that vaccinating children was a mistake. If they thought they could get away with it, I think they would stop science-juicing altogether, but that would cause a meltdown among the elderly.

It’s right now dawning on a lot of people simultaneously that they have made a mistake. ......

..... Fundamentally, the vaccination campaign represented a bet on SARS-COV-2 getting stuck in an evolutionary dead end. You can see a Moderna employee who blocked me on Twitter reveal that thought process here in the screenshot. The whole fitness landscape available to this virus can be thought of as a giant maze. If you trapped it in a particular corner, then it stands no chance to explore the rest of the maze. But that clearly failed, so now all bets are off. They forced vaccine evasive variants to come into existence, those variants had through pleiotropy the ability to jump into other species, how it behaves in those other species is something hardly anyone studies.

There is one thing that characterizes coronaviruses: They’re versatile. ........

Some coronaviruses jump into our species and cause a few nasty flu seasons for the elderly. Others seem to have decimated our primate ancestors over multiple generations. SARS-COV-2 looks like it plans on behaving more like the latter than the prior. It has something no coronavirus has ever had before: Millions of immunocompromised people, who function as human incubators where very rare strains can come into existence, strains that can then be spread around the globe within days.

I honestly believe this is probably the worst mistake in human history: The conviction of the vaccine manufacturers that they could trap SARS-COV-2 in a corner in the maze, by summoning a narrow range of high affinity IgG antibodies against a handful of epitopes of the Wuhan spike protein. You accomplish the exact opposite: You create new routes on the fitness landscape, from one destination to another. That’s what narrow immunity does: It makes variants viable that would otherwise be selected against because they can’t compete with the other variants. .......

Look at the data and you’ll notice the first major variants tended to emerge within a few weeks after the vaccines trials were held, in the places where these trials were held. You first have a window of negative efficacy for the first few weeks, then you have the surge in IgG antibodies against a handful of Spike epitopes that will then select for strange novel variants in some people. 

The more of its awful repertoire it gets to perform, the bigger the chances it ends up stumbling on one terrible song or another that makes the blood drip from our eardrums. And perhaps you’ll wonder why this is a concern for SARS-COV-2, but not for other viruses. The simplest answer would be to point out that there’s a LOT of SARS-COV-2 RNA circulating around the world right now, but not a lot of other viruses. In other words, SARS-COV-2 gets to roll the dice a lot more often than other viruses do. ......

And I have to emphasize again, that this is all your own damn fault. Once you started vaccinating, herd immunity became out of the question. The genetic evidence is pretty clear: Our immune systems are fine-tuned by evolution, to be good at dealing with coronavirus outbreaks. The immune response the population now produces is inadequate compared to what we would have been capable of. On the other hand, the virus suffers no such limitations, it has a massive sandbox in which it can discover its most potent forms. ...


What are the ethics for investigators and researchers under investigation?

....... As I examine SARS-CoV-2 genomes on my laptop, as I try to uncover truth by devouring distasteful literature full of logical fallacies, speculation-as-fact, leaps to conclusions, and complex mathematics hiding simple assumptions that simply are not true, I’m confronted with research ethics questions I haven’t confronted before. At issue is not just whether risky research proceeded with the blessing of the US and Chinese governments (and possibly large foundations like the Wellcome Trust), but whether the parties involved have subsequently tried to use their scientific institutional power and expertise to cover their tracks.

If I were studying the origin of a virus that indisputably came from a bat, I would be incorporating the behavior of bats as I synthesized the literature. I would be thinking about bats in caves, bats eating fruits in trees, bats drinking date-palm sap and peeing into buckets collecting date-palm sap, bats doing all their bat things and I would be wondering whether the bat with the virus that killed people happened to do something unusual, something we could prevent in the future. With SARS-CoV-2, one possibility is that it’s not the behavior of bats, but the behavior of funders and researchers, that caused a pandemic. These researchers have names - they sign their names to papers, emails, and grants, and their laboratory methods leave fingerprints of their idiosyncratic methods. I don’t want to falsely accuse anyone of anything, yet to study the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, absent some trusted impartial inquiry by an established authority, we have to be private investigators studying the actions of our colleagues and asking questions about the behavior of researchers. ....



CO-VIDs of the Week:

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Tweets of the Week:



Anecdotal Fare:

After realizing his COVID-19 booster shot may have sent his cancer into overdrive, Michel Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., professor of immunology and pharmacotherapy at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said going public with the information was the “right thing to do.”




Pushback Fare:

includes lots of music videos, including Muse's Compliance:





COVID Corporatocracy Fare:

Ivy League-affiliated hospital hides myocarditis ad for kids following criticism that it's trying to "normalize" vaccine-induced condition. Cardiologist explains how father's inexplicable death led him to question COVID vaccines




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


The military operation on Monday night which fired munitions to blow holes in the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines on the Baltic Sea floor, near Bornholm Island,  was executed by the Polish Navy and special forces.

It was aided by the Danish and Swedish military; planned and coordinated with US intelligence and technical support; and approved by the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. ...



Just yesterday I laid out how the U.S. is winning its war on Europe's industries and people.

That war, hidden behind the U.S. created Ukraine crisis, is designed to destroy Europe's manufacturing advantage compared to the U.S. It is more likely though to strengthen the economic position of China and other Asian economies.

I have argued that Germany must open the Nord Stream II pipeline which can bring Russian natural gas to Germany without crossing other countries' territory. It must also allow Siemens to repair the defect Nord Stream I compressors. It is in fact inevitable if German's industry is to survive.

Others have come to similar conclusion and decided to sabotage the pipelines to make their re-opening impossible:
Three offshore lines of the Nord Stream gas pipeline system have sustained "unprecedented" damage in one day, Nord Stream AG, the operator of the network, said on Tuesday in what one German official has suggested is a "targeted attack”. Nord Stream 2 suffered a gas leak which was then followed by a drop of pressure on Nord Stream 1.
The company also said that it was impossible to estimate when the gas network system's working capability would be restored.
The simultaneous sub sea damage to three pipelines is obviously not an accident.

... The war mongers at the British Telegraph claim without any evidence or logic that Russia is the culprit: ... 

....... If Russia were to cut pipelines in the Baltic Sea it would damage those that bring Norwegian gas to Europe, not the pipelines it owns and which give it some leverage.

Russia thus surely has no plausible interest in sabotaging the Nord Stream system. Others though do have such interests. They likely want Germany to 'stay in line' with their war to Decolonize Russia. The major potential actors behind this are the U.S., the British, the Ukrainian and the Polish government or a mixture of those.

...... It is high time for the German government to wake up and to recognize that a war has been launched against its country.

And no. It is not Russia that is waging it.






Other Geopolitical Fare:


The notion that right-wing candidate Georgia Meloni’s victory in Italy represents a threat to Italian democracy or the return of fascism is “absolutely fake news,” according to the country’s leftist former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

Whoops, narrative fail. ...





Orwellian Fare:

Rigger: 1905 was a good year

Von der Lie-ing, an arch-Schwabicle who was formerly on the WEF board, is passionate about both climate and digital authoritarianism. She seems to see a future in which both things are tightly controlled and interwoven with government, which must necessarily be global in nature. The idea that people will be given a “carbon allowance” that is monitored and controlled through digital ID and currencies seems like one of those conspiracies - you know, like that conspiracy during covid that people’s ability to access employment and freedoms would be contingent upon vaccination and managed through a digital app.

That never came true, did it?

Their whole command and control agenda is real and becoming more obvious every day.

........ Covid may have been deliberately released, it may have been accidental, it may have originated in some improbable chain of cross-species infection. However it originated, it represented a golden opportunity to get people used to a level of control and restriction unimaginable only a decade ago.

They have been softening us up for this for some time, in my view. Covid came along, and they stepped on the gas.

Dissent is critical. Articles countering The Message™ must be shared and talked about. We must all do this, even if it’s only a little bit, whilst we still can. I don’t care if you’re sharing the weirdest conspiracy, or the craziest theory. The point is to question. Nothing should be accepted uncritically. We need to get more people questioning things and we desperately need to fight against any stifling of our ability to do that.



including this if only b/c, as Rigger says in article above, she quotes Chesterton:



***** CaitOz Fare *****:


The New York Times, which consistently supports every American war, has published an op-ed by a neoconservative think tanker titled “Biden’s Cautious Foreign Policy Imperils Us“.

This would be Joseph Biden, the president of the United States who has been consistently vowing to go to war with the People’s Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan, and whose administration has been pouring billions of dollars into a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine which it knowingly provoked and from which it has no exit strategy. With this administration’s acceleration toward global conflict on two different fronts, one could easily argue that Biden actually has the least cautious foreign policy of any president in history. ........

...... You know you are living in a profoundly sick society when the world’s most influential newspaper runs propaganda for World War Three while voices pushing for truth, transparency and peace are marginalized, silenced, shunned, and imprisoned.



❖

The best western journalists are overwhelmingly despised while the worst are acclaimed millionaires. Western civilization is built on lies, dependent on lies, powered by lies. Don’t seek widespread approval. It’s worthless.

❖

Live long enough and you’ll learn that the people who’ll really hurt you and screw you over aren’t the obvious, overt monsters but the sly manipulators who smile to your face. The US empire is a sly manipulator smiling and posturing as the good guy by contrasting itself with overt monsters.

As our consciousness has expanded it’s become unacceptable to be seen as an overt tyrant by the public, but that just meant the emergence of a sneakier form of tyranny. The age of the brute gave way to the age of the manipulative bitch. This manipulative bitch of an empire has been instigating and orchestrating violence at mass scale and then using its unrivaled narrative control machine to blame the violence on other powers. And its provocations are only getting more and more aggressive and more and more dangerous.

If humanity meets its end, it will come not at the hands of the overt monsters but the sly manipulators. The trajectory toward the horrifying global conflict we appear to be fast approaching was set by the manipulative bitch of the US-centralized empire. ...

❖

People who defend the US empire from criticism aren’t actually defending the empire, they’re defending their worldview. They’re staving off the flood of cognitive dissonance they’d experience if they saw that everything they believe about the world is a propaganda-induced lie.

That’s why so many of them say things like “Of course our government does bad things BUT-” and then make up some nonsensical gibberish like “you think Putin is an innocent little flower” or whatever. They don’t love the empire, they’re just flailing around protecting their worldview. Their arguments consistently lack robustness because they’re not invested in defending some globe-spanning power structure (people don’t usually do that unless they’re paid to), they’re just throwing up any walls they can that will protect their worldview.



....... Ardern’s remarks are currently getting a lot of criticism in right-wing circles due largely to her suggestion that online discourse about climate change needs to be regulated so that the issue can be properly addressed. And to be sure that is an absolutely insane thing for her to say; I believe climate change is real and anthropogenic and I find the idea of silencing people who disagree with me about that unthinkably nightmarish. This is a line of thinking that can only arise from a profoundly tyrannical mind.

But what isn’t getting enough attention at this time is the fact that Ardern is calling for an increase in the already outrageous amount of online censorship we are seeing with regard to the war in Ukraine. ......

... The US has lied about every war it has ever been involved in, and if ever there was a war to bring scrutiny and skepticism to, it’s the one that is bringing us closer to a nuclear exchange than at any other time in history.



Other QOTW:

Bardi: The triumph of the right may make people outside Italy worried, but there is no reason. Elections in the West are now mainly for show. The Italian government has almost zero power, it is all in the hands of the European Commission, in turn controlled by the global powers. To say nothing about the pervasive corruption that affects the West as a whole.

el gato malo: watching the explosive cases of the vapors breaking out all over europe as country after country shifts right in attempts to save themselves from technocratic and ideological domination driven ruin endlessly foisted upon them by the cool kids table at davos is getting quite instructive.

Welsh: I don’t know who did this, but what I do know is that it almost certainly wasn’t Russia. If you thought it was, check yourself, you’ve gone off the rails into propaganda-land and your emotions are ruling your reason.

zerohedge: Note that the Walmart employees try to placate her instead of doing what they should have done, which is kick her out of the building.  The constant hand-holding of mentally unstable and emotionally stunted people is slowly but surely bringing America down.





Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


If there ever was a society under stress, it is ours. We passed all the limits of survival: destroyed the oldr-growth forests, killed off large number of species, poisoned the atmosphere, depleted our mineral resources, eroded the fertile soil, polluted water and the atmosphere, set the planet on a path to an irreversible warming and a few more little things, including having deployed a sufficient number of nuclear warhead to wreck the ecosystem and, most likely, kill everybody. And we haven’t renounced to our beloved habit of making war against each other. Would you be surprised if we were to indulge in large scale human sacrifices? We are not yet there, but the path seems to be traced. Have you noted how popular are the “Zombie” movies?

Take a look at them in light of what I have been saying here: do you see them as a blueprint for the mass extermination of suburbanites? First starve them, easy: just stop the delivery to the local supermarkets and service stations. Once they run out of food and fuel, they are doomed. Then, while they are still able to stumble along, finish them off with a bullet to the head. Truly, the fascination with this idea casts much light on what our society has in mind for the near future. We are not yet to the point of seeing the elites booking zombie-killing safaris in the suburbs of our cities. But other possible large scale sacrifices are possible. I already mentioned how the German government had hired the country’s doctors to cull the undesirables. They had complied, happily. That could be easily done in our times, too.



Pics:





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Sunday, September 25, 2022

2022-09-25

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

Economic and Market Fare:


..... summarizes the current landscape as follows: "aggressive fiscal activism reigns supreme, most visible currently in the UK. This will bring higher growth, higher inflation, and higher interest rates across the curve."

What does this mean for investors? Well, according to Edwards, for them "the party is over" as is the Ice Age that defined markets according to the SocGen strategist. And as the coming "Great Melt" melts the ‘Ice’ in ‘Ice Age’, it will also "melt investor returns away too."

......... according to the SocGen bear, the UK Government extremes of fiscal largesse will undoubtedly be countered by even more aggressive monetary tightening and QT, because of runaway inflation, rather than the monetary facilitation we saw in the pandemic.

.... world is "likely set for a decade or more of poor financial returns exacerbated by the current ongoing economic ideological shift, which effectively means that interest rates and inflation will rise on a secular basis – i.e. The Great Melt."


UK Markets Implode After Truss Unveils Historic Tax Cuts As Economy Slides Into Recession Amid Soaring Prices

..... The head of the Institute of Fiscal Studies described Kwarteng's fiscal plan as the "biggest tax-cutting event since 1972." Truss hopes tax cuts and increased government borrowing will stimulate the faltering economy as growth slows, households plunged into energy poverty and inflation at the highest in forty years




Before getting distracted by the spin put on Friday’s budget, it is important to be clear what the motivation for it is. It’s not a budget for growth, it’s a budget for the rich and those who fund the Conservative party. Abolishing the 45% tax band obviously benefits only the very well off, dropping the increase in corporation tax will mainly benefit shareholders who are mostly at the top of the income distribution, not extending the windfall tax on energy producers will exclusively benefit shareholders, not increasing NI rates benefit the better off far more than anyone else, ending the cap on bankers bonuses benefits the already very rich, and so on. Conservative MPs are much more right wing on economics than Conservative voters or even party members, and this is a budget for them, as long as it doesn’t mean they lose their jobs.

The Resolution Foundation calculatesthat almost two thirds of the tax gains go to the richest fifth of the population, with almost half going to the top 5%. They also point out that the stamp duty changes mainly benefit richer households in the South East. Of course poorer households will get a small amount of this giveaway, but less than is needed to cover the increased costs of essentials according to NEF. ...

It is also a budget that is highly likely to mean cuts in public spending after the next election. ...

... Worse still, as I outlined here, the evidence clearly suggests that increasing inequality at the top reduces growth. Either the government is blind to the evidence, or they have to pretend it’s all about growth as a cover for the true reason for tax breaks for the rich: their ideology and party donors. .....


The Budget for the Very Rich

Budgets often reflect nothing more than the dreams and aspirations of a finance minister. Today Britain’s finance minister presented a budget which revealed something more sinister. The overthrow of the Johnson government was indeed a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to dislodge the electoral mandate (for “levelling up”) of a government and replace it with an undemocratic mandate to serve the interests of the very rich, while bearing (or “levelling”) down on the poor. 

This IS the right wing Revolt of the Rich. .....



The morning after Kwasi Kwarteng’s non-budget it is hard to write an objective appraisal because there was nothing objective about it.

The fact that it was not called a budget when very obviously it was just that was contemptuous of parliament, and everyone else in the country.

The fact that Kwarteng set out to spend more money than any other Chancellor in history and yet do nothing to help the public services, or anyone working for them, or anyone in need in the UK was staggering. Money was reserved for the very wealthiest, companies, and the households who consume the most energy. Banks and energy companies get a bonanza from Kwarteng. No one else will......



A recession so contrived and man-made that every economist, politician, business owner, college student, CEO, rapper and professional athlete has been able to see it coming in real-time for months and months…

Take a picture, you may never see anything so obviously about to happen ever again. A child could have foreseen it.

At a certain point, a person who is charge of price stability should probably look in the mirror and say “For whatever reason, I am not good at this. Or whatever method I am using to make decisions is not going well or producing positive outcomes.”

I don’t think this is so much to ask of the people we put in charge of our institutions.

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee for example. ....


Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’. But instead of building up a messier and messier picture of human behavior, we need a new model.



Charts: 
1:



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


... Yes, we should make fossil-fuel companies pay for the damage they have wrought. But since doing so will involve a messy power struggle, we need to be pragmatic. On that front, here’s a clever option: look for under-enforced legislation that if fully enforced, would make the fossil-fuel business go bankrupt.

True, this type of law sounds far-fetched. But it’s actually quite common. Here’s why.

When fossil-fuel companies extract resources, they are usually required to cleanup their (local) mess. For example, when an oil company drains a well, it’s supposed to plug the hole and return the well site to its original condition. Since this cleanup is a legal obligation, you’d think that oil companies — being law-abiding corporate citizens — would have been diligently cleaning up their defunct wells. But for the most part, they let these obligations slide.1 And so their cleanup liabilities have slowly accumulated.

For years, researcher and activist Regan Boychuk has been watching this crisis unfold. A resident of the oil-rich province of Alberta (Canada), Boychuk is one of the few people paying attention to the oil industry’s growing cleanup liabilities. He thinks the procrastination strategy is nearing its end game. If current cleanup liabilities were called in, Boychuk suspects that the oil industry couldn’t cover them — not even if it drained every existing well. In other words, Alberta’s conventional2 oil business is bankrupt.



Other Fare:

The stolen masterpieces have never turned up—and nobody’s really looking for them




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Tracey: A Fairy Tale Version of World War II is Being Used to Sell the Next World War



Endemic 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



As I mentioned a few days ago, the genetic signatures in primate populations are clear: We’re survivors of those who survived repeated episodes of mass culling by corona viruses. With that knowledge in the back of your head, any attempt at mass vaccination risks exacerbating what is inherently already an existential threat. But people are stupid, so they went ahead and injected everyone with this stuff.

The Japanese authors of this paper don’t dance around the issue: The Omicron waves are being enhanced by vaccination. .....

They conclude their study by writing: “These results suggest that the rapid spread of Omicron around the world may in part result from the lack of cross-neutralization against Omicron and some ADE activity of sera after vaccination.” This isn’t exactly subtle anymore, is it? 

None of this will come as a shock to those of you who have been reading my posts on Omicron since we first heard of it. There was a lot of delusional optimism that this would now mean the end of the pandemic, but as I warned at the time, this was the point where we would witness the successive birth of new iterations of SARS-COV-2 with growing enhancement of disease by mass vaccination.

I’ve also warned a few times now that as you approach complete antibody evasion the speed of mutation would increase, as it would rapidly begin to pile on more spike mutations. And guess what’s happening: ........

.... So far, 2022 has been the deadliest year of the pandemic here in Europe. They’re not telling you this, they’re calling the excess mortality “unexplained”, because acknowledging this means acknowledging the vaccines have exacerbated this pandemic, as I warned you was going to happen. If the pandemic was over, you would see negative excess mortality, as so many of the dead are above 85. You don’t see negative excess mortality, so it’s not over.

Now you have the situation where everyone is constantly being reinfected, because the shrinking subset of antibodies recalled by reinfections are progressively easier to avoid again through mutations. No matter which way you cut it, that’s not a good thing. If through some miracle, we manage to overcome the homogenization of the population’s immune response, perhaps through exposure to other pathogens, that still means that during this window of homogenization and unprecedented mass infection we massively increased the genetic diversity of this virus, allowing it to arrive at all sorts of highly fit new variants that won’t just disappear once our immune response improves. In other words, your engine broke down, you fixed it, but you already lost the race.

There is no easy way out of this. It’s stupid to pretend the population will be fine after repeated episodes of infection from this virus.

.... If I were wrong, if the lockdowns were a great idea, if the masks were going to help bring this pathogen under control, if we would be better off if we had arrows that tell us where to walk in the department store, I would tell you. But you can look at the excess mortality statistics here and notice that Sweden is doing decidedly better than all its Scandinavian neighbors and even better than places like Hong Kong and South Korea.

The earlier variants deliver the body the experience it needs to survive the later variants. Just as it’s safer to donate half a liter of blood once every three months than to donate two liters once a year, it’s better to suffer a bit of damage from the occasional infection, than to spend two years not getting infected, only to get unlucky and get hit unprepared, by a virus that has learned to reproduce and avoid innate immunity in the bodies of people who have experience with this pathogen.

.... If you want to hear a solution, which I know you do, then the obvious answer is to look towards the place that’s mysteriously avoiding the global carnage and misery: Sub-Saharan Africa. What are they doing differently? A few things.

To start with, they don’t engage in unprecedented experiment against the human holobiont. The non-human organisms that live around the human body are not being decimated in sub-Saharan Africa. There are no strange genetic experiments to force the human body to develop an immune response against SARS-COV-2 it would never develop on its own from natural infection. In addition, people constantly get infected with a wide variety of other pathogens, so that SARS-COV-2 encounters bodies that are well experienced with a range of different tactics to avoid alerting our immune systems.

......... And as I have said a few times, you really need to airline industry to shut down. You need to deglobalize the world. Omicron emerged in South Africa, if it had died out there the pandemic would have been over by now. Now we’re dealing with the descendants of BA.2.75, which is doing nothing out of the ordinary in India, but causing the next waves here in the Western world. This is not what people like to hear, but it is the reality we’re dealing with: Any new version that emerges anywhere now takes over the whole world. This is not compatible with human health.

This pandemic is going to continue, until the survivors learn to live in harmony with non-human organisms. The longer that takes, the fewer such survivors there will be.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

el gato malo: i’ve musing of late about just how it came to pass that the entirety of western governance seems to have become bereft of reality and competence and generally run by people who appear to be about as smart as a soup sandwich and yet have managed to accrue not only such intense confidence in their own planning ability and vision but in addition gained access to the levers of power to impose their addled ideas upon the rest of us while aided and abetted by a cheer-leader class that eggs them ever onward. it’s really quite a thing.

Yakk: What you have to appreciate is that when he [Trudeau] says that you need to make sure you are up-to-date with your vaccines so you can continue to do the things you enjoy with the people you love…what do you think he really saying?



Anecdotal Fare:

Chudov: Canadian Woman Died 7 Minutes After Bivalent Booster. Death Ruled "Natural Cause"
The coverup puts similar people at risk of death!





COVID Conspiracy Fare:

My blue pilled friends can't figure out why, if the vaccines are so dangerous, aren't more doctors speaking out. Here's why.

My blue pilled friends who believe the vaccines are safe have told me they would reconsider their position if just a single one of their own doctors came out against the vaccine. One of them said even if a “TV doctor” (such as Sanjay Gupta) said it was unsafe, they would reconsider their position.

I told them that doctors are afraid to speak out because they will lose their ability to practice medicine if they challenge the mainstream narrative.

My friends find that too hard to believe. They asked me incredulously, “Why would the medical community silence doctors who are trying to save lives?”

They didn’t believe my answer.

So I wanted to interview a doctor who is very highly respected and who is not an “anti-vaxxer” to explain it to them.

Here is my interview with Dr. Marik on the subject where he describes how he was personally retaliated by the medical community after he discovered early treatment work and the vaccines are unsafe. It’s really stunning. They actually had to fabricate patients who don’t exist.

Note also that Dr. Marik was a believer in the COVID vaccine; he took it just like he was told. It took him months looking at the evidence before he changed his mind.

I asked him in the interview, “Now that you realize the vaccines are not safe, could you have gotten it wrong this time?” He said, “No, the evidence is very clear.”

He regrets not having done his homework and trusting others when he took the shot. It was only after he looked at the data directly himself, he said the data was crystal clear.

When he started speaking out, he was retaliated against by the medical community.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:




Voting for membership in the Russian Federation has started in four oblast of Ukraine: “Russian proxy officials in four regions — Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, and Kherson and Zaporizka in the south — earlier this week announced plans to hold referendums over four days beginning on Friday. Russia controls nearly all of two of the four regions, Luhansk and Kherson, but only a fraction of the other two, Zaporizka and Donetsk. Ukrainian officials have dismissed the voting as grotesque theater — staging polls in cities laid to waste by Russian forces and abandoned by most residents.” President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked Ukraine’s allies for their steadfast support and said “the farce” of “sham referenda” would do nothing to change his nation’s fight to drive Russia from Ukraine.

The Ukrainian regime has resorted to pure terrorism to prevent the votes from happening....



Putin’s decision to order a partial mobilization of the Russian military, when combined with the decision to conduct the referendums in the Donbass and occupied Ukraine, radically transforms the SMO from a limited-scope operation to one linked to the existential survival of Russia. Once the referenda are conducted, and the results forwarded to the Russian parliament, what is now the territory of Ukraine will, in one fell swoop, become part of the Russian Federation — the Russian homeland. All Ukrainian forces that are on the territory of the regions to be incorporated into Russia will be viewed as occupiers; and Ukrainian shelling of this territory will be treated as an attack on Russia, triggering a Russian response.

Whereas the SMO had, by design, been implemented to preserve Ukrainian civil infrastructure and reduce civilian casualties, a post-SMO military operation will be one configured to destroy an active threat to Mother Russia itself. The gloves will come off.


Kunstler: “Joe Biden’s” Last Stand

Historians of the future, grilling spatchcocked plovers over their campfires, will need not ponder for even a New York minute who started World War Three in the rockin’ 2020s. They will point straight to the waxy, furtive, larval figure known as “Joe Biden,” by then judged a moral weevil of such epic low degree that he became an embarrassment to all the other sewer-dwelling denizens of the dank DC underworld, including the roaches, the rats, the humble shipworms eating through sunk oaken foundations of buildings long forgotten, the writhing maggots rinsed from a thousand restaurant dumpsters, the slithering hellgrammites, millipedes, silverfish, pillbugs, termites, dung-beetles, woodlice, and, not least, the scaly lawyers spawned out of the infestation beneath K Street called Perkins Coie LLP. Even these would loathe and disdain the thing that came into this world as “Joe Biden.”

Let us agree that the place called Ukraine was never any of America’s business. For centuries we ignored it, through all the colorful cavalry charges to-and-fro of Turks and Tatars, the reign of the dashing Zaporozhian Cossacks, the cruel abuses of Stalin, then Hitler, and the dull, gray Khrushchev-to-Yeltsin years. But then, having destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and sundry other places all on a great hegemonic lark, the professional warmongers of our land and their catamites in Washington made Ukraine their next special project.  They engineered the 2014 coup in Kiev that ousted the elected president, Mr. Yanyukovich, to set up a giant grifting parlor and international money-laundromat. The other strategic aim was to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership, which would have made it, in effect, a forward missile base right up against Russia’s border. Because, well, Russia, Russia, Russia!

An early beneficiary of these arrangements, you might recall, was one Hunter Biden, the drug-addicted, sex-obsessed, no-account son of Barack Obama’s no-account vice-president then known simply as Joe Biden sans quote-marks — because in 2014, he was a closer approximation of a real person than is sadly now the case. In fact, he was known as “The Big Guy” among Hunter’s business coterie (though listed as “Pedo Peter” on Hunter’s speed-dial). After the 2014 coup, and for years beyond, Hunter pulled a steady revenue stream out of Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings, a natgas distributor (among other things), serving as a know-nothing, no-show board member. When this monkey business came to the attention of President Trump, and he made a telephone inquiry about it, he was instantly beset by swarms of DC swamp vermin hoisting writs of impeachment.

Fast forward through the past eight years and you have Kiev’s persecution of the Russian-speaking Donbas provinces, the constant shelling and harassment by Banderite Nazis. Between that and the ever more strident urgings for Ukraine to join NATO, President Putin of Russia, Russia, Russia apparently had enough. In February of this year, he started the Special Military Operation to put an end to these hostilities. By April, when whole battalions of Ukrainian Nazis had been exterminated, a call to peace talks was issued by Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. This was shot-down without ceremony by “Joe Biden” (that is, by the junta behind him). The genius strategists in Foggy Bottom aimed to “weaken” Russia. To what end? (you might ask). Okay: Reasons….

Hence, many hard-fought battles on-the-ground later, Ukraine has lost roughly 70,000 troops killed to Russia’s roughly 6,000 KIA. The USA pours $10-billion-a-month into this venture, including missiles aplenty and other ordnance, in a stupid effort to prolong the conflict and bankrupt our own land. Thus, Mr. Putin has decided to stop pussyfooting around Ukraine, and declared an upgrade in Russia’s effort to put a conclusive end to these shenanigans. He set this forth clearly in a sober speech Wednesday, which included a reminder to the geniuses in the White House basement game room that Russia is a nuclear power.

“Joe Biden” (looking like the ghost of Konstantin Chernenko) answered in a speech to the UN General Assembly the next day, a maundering recitation of sanctimonious bluster, larded with climate hysteria to alarm and bamboozle the UN’s scores of Third World delegates, with not a word about any possible peace talks — because peaceful resolution of the conflict is the last thing that our government wants. It wants war, meaning we citizens of this land will get it, good and hard, if the puppeteers working “Joe Biden’s” mouth get their way. Prepare to live in an ashtray. ......

..... Not to put too fine a point on it: the shit has already hit the fan. We are where we were going. If you truly believe those 2020 national election results, then this is what you voted for, America. Feeling any buyer’s remorse yet? Got the feeling that something must be done? Okay then, what?



....... The Russian foreign minister presented a long list of human rights violations by Kiev that went ignored by various European and global human rights groups, from “burning books, just like in Nazi Germany” to using banned ‘petal’ land mines against civilians this summer. “Such outrages became possible and remain unpunished due to the fact that the US and its allies, with the connivance of international human rights institutions, have been systematically covering up the crimes of the Kiev regime for eight years, basing their policy towards [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky based on the well-known American principle: he may be a son of a b*tch, but he is our son of a b*tch,” said Lavrov.




The Western media is a collection of liars in a propaganda ministry, and its so-called “Russian experts” are for the most part Russophobes operating on grants from the US military/security complex.  Consequently, Westerners have no valid understanding of the conflict in Ukraine, how it arose, and how the West’s involvement together with extraordinary provocations, has  created in the Russian leadership the conviction that the goal of the West is to destroy Russia.  As this conviction hardens, the Russian leadership is abandoning hope of peaceful coexistence with the Western world and is preparing for war.

In his speech Putin begins the preparation of the Russian people for the hard reality.  Putin doesn’t like the hard reality and did his best to avoid it by ignoring provocations and insults until it became impossible because, as Putin says,  “the West has crossed every line.”

The West, of course, is Washington.  The rest of the Western world reports to Washington as I learned from a US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. “How,” I asked him, “do we get the other countries to do what we want?”  “Money,” he replied. “You mean foreign aid?”  “No, we give the leaders bagfuls of money.  They report to us.  We own them.” 

This means that there are no independent Western voices in Britain, Germany, France or elsewhere to moderate Washington’s drive for world hegemony.  There is no one to say, “do you know what you are doing?” There is no one to warn Washington that the US is pushing Russia too hard.  There is no one to warn us against believing our own propaganda. Consequently, Washington has pushed the Russian leadership out of the accommodation mode into the prepare for conflict mode.

This clearly demonstrates how dangerous is the neoconservatives’ unilateralism.  There is no one to talk back to Washington but Washington’s chosen enemies, whose words, if reported at all, are always reported out of context following the propaganda line that it is Russia and China, never Washington, who is the threat and cause of conflict. ........
The topic of my speech is the situation in Donbas and the course of a special military operation to liberate it from the neo-Nazi regime that seized power in Ukraine in 2014 as a result of an armed coup. ................


***** CaitOz Fare ***** :


.... One who is sincere and courageous about having an authentic relationship with reality will take seriously the very real possibility that this could all be ending fairly soon. They will face this possibility directly and let it inform the way their humanity expresses itself in the world, rather than compartmentalizing away from it and avoiding it.

It’s just a fact that based on what we know about what nuclear war would mean for life on this planet and how we’re hearing more and more often that we’re now already closer to armageddon than we were during the last cold war, humanity as we know it may not be around for much longer. Our end could very well come not in millennia or even centuries, but in months or years.

..... For those who are willing and able to face our situation where it stands, it’s a useful object of contemplation which brings up a lot of highly relevant questions about how to better live life to its fullest. Questions that kind of demand answers.

Questions like, would I be happy with the way I’ve been spending my time lately if it turned out that tomorrow is the day the ICBMs start flying?

Would I be content with the things that my interest and attention have been focusing on, not just in my outward expression but silently in my mind?

What would I wish I had done? What would I wish I had done more of? What would I wish I had stopped doing? ....

... Have I been living a life of truth and integrity? Have my behavior, speech and thinking aligned with what I know to be true? With what I believe to be valuable? With what I think of as an authentic human being?

Only you can answer these questions for yourself, but they do deserve answers. ...



Future generations, if there are future generations,
will scarce believe that our species once stockpiled armageddon weapons on purpose,
once built our entire civilization around economic models that could only result in the destruction of our biosphere,
once permitted corporations who profit from war to successfully lobby policymakers to start more wars,
once warehoused living beings in factory farms where they were tortured and brutalized,
once starved children to death with sanctions because their rulers disobeyed our rulers,
once made policies which kept people poor so they’d be financially coerced into facilitating military mass murder,
once let people go hungry and homeless if they didn’t have enough imaginary numbers in their bank accounts,
once stripped this planet of biodiversity and old growth forests to turn the gears of an imaginary economy instead of collaborating with our ecosystem.

Future generations, if there are future generations,
will look back in perplexity at our omnicidal madness,
at our blind subservience to the very worst among us, ....



Other Quotes of the Week:

Peterson: “I know what I’d do in his shoes,” he said on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show on Thursday. “I’d wait till the first cold snap and shut off the taps.”

Piepenburg: I am once again reminded of the 2014 statement made by then U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, that Russia would run out of money long before the West ran out of energy.

Byju: Only after learning the definition of what the late anthropologist David Graeber called bullshit jobs did I realize that—despite the unparalleled clout I received from society as a consultant—I was, in fact, working a bullshit job. This simple detail would reveal not only why I was so miserably employed, but also an alarming truth about how we’ve arranged our society.




Rigger-ous Reads (on Culture Wars, Identity Politics, etc.):


I’m a bit further into the book Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. As I read more about the “social justice” view of the world, what we might term the “woke” perspective, the more my sense of unreality and disbelief increases. How can seemingly intelligent people believe this utter pile of shite?

That assessment may be a little harsh, because there ARE some good points made along the way by some of these woke theorists described in the book, but it’s like they take a few salient observations and construct some absurd fantasy; it’s akin to conspiracy theorizing par excellence.

What is uncovered in the book is a “woke” depiction of ‘reality’ that’s not tethered to anything, least of all reality. I’ve repurposed an old Gary Larson cartoon that neatly sums up my current view....

...... The overriding impression one gains is that it’s not supposed to make sense, in any ‘traditional’ meaning of the word sense. They’re not at all interested in ‘truth’ in any objective sense, but they are passionately, obsessively, wedded to subjective ‘truth’.

.... Instead of a universal view of humanity, a view that is pretty much rejected by the woke theorists, we now have a ridiculous and obsessive focus on differences rather than commonalities. Race, gender, sexuality, disability, weight - you name it, we’re explicitly being pressured into focussing on our differences, rather than the things that draw us together as human beings.

They think this is the right thing to do.

They are Grade A morons. ....



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


Although social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is considered “heterodox” (these days that means “anti-progressive”), I’ve found that nearly everything he’s written is worth reading. That especially includes his two books The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, the latter co-written with Greg Lukianoff. Haidt is neither a polemicist nor a firebrand, but he says what he thinks and calls out nonsense in a no-nonsense way. And now he’s taking a hike from an important academic group because it violates his principles.

Haidt was in fact one of the cofounders of the Heterodox Academy, an organization of academics promoting viewpoint diversity, which of course is the wrong kind of diversity. The group grew out of a talk promoting viewpoint diversity given by Haidt in 2011 at the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—the biggest and best-known society of its kind.

And that leads to the double irony that’s the subject of today’s post.  In an article on the Heterodox Academy‘s website (click below to read), Haidt announces that he’s resigning from the SPSP, and for exactly the reason that helped birth the academy ten years ago—the quashing of viewpoint diversity by academia.

.... Haidt notes that there are two “fiduciary duties” of professors, and by that he means duties that are directed towards a beneficiary (in this case, academics and students), must be adhered to with absolute loyalty, and in which there is no taint of self-interest. All other duties are subsidiary and must go away when in conflict with these two. Here are those duties as quoted by Haidt:

1). As teachers I believe we have a fiduciary duty to our students’ education.

2.) As scholars I believe we have a fiduciary duty to the truth.

Together these serve to fulfill the telos of a university (its end or purpose), and that telos is truth—finding and promulgating truth.

Haidt actually calls these duties “quasi-fiduciary duties” since we aren’t obligated to promote students’ overall welfare, nor is there an agent for whose benefit we seek the truth. He gives four examples of how a professor can violate each of these duties, and argues that universities are now declining in public esteem because they’re making the second duty subsidiary to other goals, goals that fall under the aegis of “advancing social justice”



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