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Saturday, September 3, 2022

2022-09-03

Part I of Labour Day weekend posts:

getting caught up on a couple of weeks' missed reading for vacation will require a couple of posts!


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


Economic and Market Fare:

***** Crescat Capital: A VICIOUS STAGFLATIONARY ENVIRONMENT

Today’s restrictive Fed policies in a rapidly deteriorating economy are the preconditions for a steep recession. Contrary to the unprecedented monetary and fiscal support we had following the last economic downturn, we are currently experiencing a major withdrawal of liquidity at a time when corporate fundamentals are starting to contract. Despite the deepest yield curve inversion in decades, the Fed is raising rates at its fastest pace since 1984 as it prepares to shrink its balance sheet by $90 billion per month, starting next month. Already, in the last three months, M2 money supply also contracted by its largest amount in 63 years!

In the meantime, inflation remains deeply entrenched in the economy. These are arguably the most challenging set of circumstances the Fed has confronted in many decades. Central banks can sacrifice economic growth as long as unemployment rates stay low, which we believe to be highly unlikely.

Looking back at the Great Inflation period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the rise in consumer prices preceded substantial increases in unemployment rates. On average, after two years of the initial appreciation in inflation rates, labor markets started to falter. Today, it has been exactly two years and three months since CPI rates began to trend higher. With such a level of monetary tightening with already eroding economic conditions, we strongly believe unemployment rates are poised to rise significantly from their current levels. ...

... We believe January 3rd marked the peak for US stocks and this is just the beginning of a bear market from truly historical overvaluations. .......

.... Equity markets are not priced for the vicious stagflationary environment that we envision. Overall, stocks are behaving as if we were still in a secular disinflationary environment which allows the Fed to loosen monetary conditions without causing inflationary pressure. As prices for goods and services continue to increase at historically elevated levels, so will the cost of capital. That is not a positive scenario for growth stocks, particularly relative to value companies. The Russell Growth vs. Value index spread still is near the peak levels reached in the Tech Bubble of 2000. This further supports our view that the decline in the overall equity markets is just the beginning. ....

... While many investors believe share buyback programs have been widely successful, the data shows otherwise. Stocks with the highest buyback ratios have underperformed the overall market in the last three years. It gets worse. If we look at the members of the S&P 500 Buyback index, 89% of their cash flow generated in the last 12 months was used to buy back their shares. Managers have been making poor capital allocation decisions, buying back expensive shares, and under-investing in future growth.



Last weekend, Credit Suisse repo guru published what may have been the most insightful snippet of the entire European energy crisis (to date) when he extended the infamous "Minsky Moment" framework to Europe, and specifically Germany, which he said "can’t cover its payments without Russian gas and the government is asking citizens to conserve energy to leave more for industry." He then elaborated that "Minsky moments are triggered by excessive financial leverage, and in the context of supply chains, leverage means excessive operating leverage: in Germany, $2 trillion of value added depends on $20 billion of gas from Russia… …that’s 100-times leverage – much more than Lehman’s." (Zoltan's entire note is a must read for everyone with a passing interest in what comes next).


uhm, yup, that's what's a gonna happen


"The Market Is Convinced That Powell Will Cut Rates At The First Sign Of Trouble... And It's Correct"

...As long as he sticks to the Fed’s fairy tale that they can bring down inflation without causing a recession, the markets are likely to cling to the idea that the Fed will cut rates at the first sign of trouble. In fact, the soft-landing story lacks any economic logic. ...



The gathering consensus that inflation has peaked is spurring a FOMO moment for bonds, with investors eager to buy and chatter that 10-year Treasury yields could drop all the way back to 2%. That sort of Treasuries rally is unlikely unless China’s slowdown worsens.

While the Fed is willing to risk a recession to quell inflation, China’s economic outlook is going from bad to worse. Most troubling of all, Beijing is turning abruptly back to exactly the sort of stimulus measures they warned of as being counter-productive. It’s a nightmare scenario for global GDP and a boon to bond holders.

This helps explain why deep-pocketed investors from US fund managers to Japanese life insurers and Australian pension giants are lining up to buy bonds despite yields that are way below inflation levels.

Indeed, the average yield of Bloomberg’s global government bond index topped out not much above 2%. While much of that period saw unprecedented central bank stimulus, there’s plenty of evidence that the savings glut remains a powerful restraint on yields. ...







.... In second quarter 2022, the average loan amount for a new vehicle rose 13.21 percent year over year, to $40,290. During this period, monthly payments rose from $582 to $667, an increase of 14.6 percent.

For used vehicles, average loans jumped 18.66 percent, to $28,534, while the average monthly payment rose from $440 to $515.



..... Just wait until these youngsters with +$1,000 monthly payments panic sell their vehicles as the economy craters. 




















Quotes of the Week:

CP: There are other markets that are not talking to each other. Our Canadian oil majors are trading for less than five times earnings because, supposedly, there is going to be an electric vehicle transition that brings us battery electric vehicles powered by "renewable" (wind and solar) energy. Well if that is true, we are going to need vast quantities of steel, copper, concrete, and other basic materials. Yet when we look, we find that the investors who espouse this transition have not invested in the production of any of those materials, and shares of those companies are going begging at very low valuations. Professional investors seem to have lost the ability to translate a worldview into a portfolio if it involves natural resources.



Charts: 
1:




Bubble Fare:



***** "Prepare For An Epic Finale" - Jeremy Grantham Warns Stock Market 'Super Bubble' Has Yet To Burst

... "You had a typical bear market rally the other day and people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s a new bull market,” Grantham said in an interview with Bloomberg. “That is nonsense.”

...

“My bet is that we're going to have a fairly tough time of it economically and financially before this is washed through the system,’’ Grantham said. 

“What I don't know is: Does that get out of hand like it did in the ‘30s, is it pretty well contained as it was in 2000 or is it somewhere in the middle?"







(not just) for the ESG crowd:

A long spell of extreme hot and dry weather is affecting energy, water supplies and food production across China


Pakistan has more than 7,000 glaciers. Climate change is melting them into floodwater.





The chickens of past energy policy choices have come home to roost in 2022; a Panglossian tendency to ignore tradeoffs is finally changing to a reconsideration and recalibration of the speed and cost of the energy transition. Importantly, rising fuel costs and climate aspirations have underscored the value of reliable baseload power, such as from nuclear plants. Germany is the clearest example of a country forced to make a shocking policy reversal in the face of the new energy reality. ...



Global demand for electricity is set to grow around 50% by 2040.

As the only energy source of low-carbon, scalable, reliable, and affordable electricity, nuclear is set to play a prominent role in meeting this growing demand while satisfying decarbonization objectives globally. ...

... Canada’s Athabasca Basin region in Saskatchewan and Alberta has the highest-grade uranium deposits in the world, with grades that are 10 to 100 times greater than the average grade of deposits elsewhere.






A Chinese Drought Would Be a Global Catastrophe

Given the country’s overriding importance to the global economy, potential water-driven disruptions beginning in China would rapidly reverberate through food, energy, and materials markets around the world and create economic and political turbulence for years to come.





Generally when your product or service is so poor that your customers decide to go on a hunger strike to try and resolve their issues, it's not the best PR look for your particular company.



China currently assembles 76% of the world’s batteries. Materials needed for the batteries are mostly outside the US.



RIP Fare:


I don’t have a lot of heroes, political or otherwise, but Barbara Ehrenreich was one. She was so sharp, as a writer and thinker, that I think it’s easy to overlook the fundamental decency that animated her project. May she rest in peace and power. ...



There can be few leaders whose reputation at home differs so widely from his reputation abroad as the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, who died on Monday aged 91. Hailed as a hero in the West for ending the Cold War, liberating the people of Eastern Europe, and bringing democracy and freedom to the nations of the former Soviet Union, he is reviled in Russia as a man who inherited a superpower and then destroyed it, leaving it dismembered and impoverished. ...

... On reaching the pinnacle of Soviet power, Gorbachev thus sought not to dismantle the system but to make it function more efficiently. As he told the 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, “Our goal is to realize the full potential of socialism. Those in the West who expect us to renounce socialism will be disappointed. We’re not going to give up on socialism. On the contrary, we need more socialism.”

Gorbachev’s problem was that he had very little idea how to do this as well as a faulty understanding of the underlying causes of the USSR’s social and economic difficulties. ...

............ Gorbachev seems to have imagined that if the Soviets dismantled their Cold War infrastructure, the West would do the same. But the West never had any intention of doing such a thing. In the eyes of Gorbachev’s Russian critics, he was, simply put, a dupe.

Mikhail Gorbachev meant well. An idealist, he believed in communism’s humanist potential. Realizing that communism’s practice fell short of its promise, he sought to do something about it. In the process, he unleashed hidden forces that destroyed the system he hoped to revive. For better or for worse, we are still living with the consequences today.



Mikhail Gorbachev was the first President of the Soviet Union and the last Soviet leader. He was the best of the younger generation of Communist Party members who understood, like US President Ronald Reagan, the futility of the Cold War and the needless threat of nuclear Armageddon. Gorbachev also understood that the repressions and hardships of the Soviet years were unnecessary, and he with advisors, some of whom I met and engaged in discussion, attempted to reform the Soviet system. There is no question that he was a great man and a sincere leader of the Soviet peoples.



Other Fare:


The CDC has admitted what was ban-worthy 'fake news' just months ago - that Covid mutated to evade current vaccines which were created for the original strains, after nearly 40% of the people hospitalized in the US with Omicron were vaxxed and boosted.




"A Perfect Storm": Sharp Rise In Abandoned Pets As Cost-Of-Living Skyrockets In UK

... According to the center, the abandoning of pets was caused by a "perfect storm" of increased dog ownership during the pandemic, combined with surging rents and other costs of living. ...



Pics of the Week:







Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Turley: Denver Public Schools Show Video Telling Kids to Avoid Police “as Perpetrators of Violence”



Of the last three presidents, Trump was either the most indifferent or the most obstructed when it came to using government agencies for his own partisan political advantages or to neuter his enemies.

For the Left, Donald Trump is synonymous with “fascism” (or “semi-fascism,” as Joe Biden put it the other day). And for Liz Cheney and most of the NeverTrumpers, he remains an existential threat to democracy. 

But to quantify those charges, what exactly has Trump done extralegally - as opposed to his bombast and braggadocio about what he might have wished to have done? 

And what are the standards by which to judge this supposed menace?

Did Trump illegally and with a mere signature nullify over $300 billion of contracted student loans—to firm up his college-student and college-graduate base nine weeks before the midterm elections?

.... If Trump wished to abuse his power over the IRS, he would have followed the Obama model of weaponizing it during a reelection year to go after his ideological enemies. 

......... The strange thing about Trump was that he did not use extraordinary powers to investigate anyone unlawfully. He boasted, he railed, he screamed, he whined, he became at times crude and obnoxious. But he did not use the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, or the IRS to go after the Obamas, the Clintons, or the Bidens. 

Instead, he became the most investigated, probed, smeared, and autopsied president in modern history. Trump’s legislative agenda did not include revolutionary changes in the Electoral College or the filibuster, or radical changes to the Supreme Court.

In fact, of the last three presidents, Trump was either the most inept or indifferent, or the most obstructed concerning any issue of using government agencies for his own partisan political advantages or to neuter his enemies. ...




no, its not RUS-UKR, so you don't hear about it in our useless Western MSM, but its happening all the time:
"This is a completely under-the-radar news story, one that was curiously absent from the headlines in all of the major newspapers this morning," wrote one expert after the latest U.S. strike on Somalia.






Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost.

This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse.

Politicians cannot possibly admit that today’s world economy is headed for collapse, in a way similar to that of prior civilizations. Instead, they need to provide the illusion that they are in charge. The self-organizing system somehow leads politicians to put forward reasons why the changes ahead might be desirable (to avert climate change), or at least temporary (because of sanctions against Russia).

In this post, I will try to try to explain at least a few of the issues involved. ...


It Will Happen Suddenly

As the Great Unravelling progresses, we shall be seeing many negative developments, some of them unprecedented.

............ When an empire collapses, it dies slowly. Unless it comes to an end through conquest, it deteriorates in a series of sudden jolts. Its leaders grasp at anything that might cause a delay, even if this means a worse outcome in the end. The process may take years and even decades. However, it is in the first few years that the major events occur—the events that create the most significant damage.

This occurs for two reasons. The first is that the leaders of the country, believing in their own power, believe that they can maintain control of their trade, their overseas control, their military, etc. and find that, when the crashes come, the rats desert the ship in every area. The second reason is that any empire builds its strength upon lies and exaggeration as much as it builds on its true attributes. After a crash, these lies and exaggerations fall away, and in a short time, it becomes clear that the empire was, in its latter stages, a house of cards.

The warning signs are already taking place but are not heavily publicised.

The stage is set, and we are approaching the first major events.







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


But what does it mean?



.... in Q3 of 2021, there was an alarming spike in Working Age Excess Deaths. In ages 35-44, it was 100% over normal (i.e., double) for that quarter. This rate of excess deaths has remained over 40% on average among working age adults (who were forced to take the jab to stay employed) during Q1 and Q2 of 2022 and at around 20% above average across all age groups.

He says SOA’s numbers corroborate Sterling’s numbers, that 61,000 Millennials were killed by the vaxx through the third quarter of 2021, or roughly the same number of young American soldiers killed throughout the entire Vietnam War. It’s a silent war that’s not being reported by the legacy media.

Ed Dowd suspects that the insurance industry reports are the reason why the CDC reversed course on its COVID “guidance” – which are nevertheless being maintained by certain corrupt agencies and districts, such as the Pentagon and Philadelphia. ...




The disturbing evidence against lockdowns piled even higher this week, with new studies on two continents showing that children not only suffered significant learning loss but sharply higher abuse at home too. 



Charts:





Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Chudov: Remember how Joe Biden and Rachel Maddow said that Covid stops with every vaccinated person? Turns out that it was not true for people, and it is not even true for mice.



Anecdotal Fare:

A Canadian practice urges parents to bring their kids in—those between 6 months and 4 years old—for "vaccination," even as the national toll of children "dying suddenly" keeps rising



Pushback Fare:





“Tricky.”

Over the course of 110 pages in a federal complaint, that one descriptive word seemed to stand out among the exchanges between social media executives and public health officials on censoring public viewpoints. The exchange reveals long-suspected coordination between the government and these social media companies to manage a burgeoning censorship system. ...

.......... The “tricky” part for the public is how to deal with the circumvention of the First Amendment in a system of censorship by surrogates. Outsourcing the suppression of opposing views threatens the same core values in our government.


The mother of all Covid conspiracy theories is true

Considering the endless ways in which the pandemic and our response to it have changed the lives of every human being on the planet, it’s astonishing to consider how little is actually known about the origins of the virus. Two and half years on, we are still very much in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its appearance.

This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments: America and China. This is the mother of all Covid conspiracy theories — but it’s also true. ...



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:


A couple of weeks before Vladimir Putin announced his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, he met in the Kremlin with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz. At their joint press conference following the meeting, Putin mentioned in passing that Ukraine is controlled today by neo-Nazis. This remark was famously ridiculed by Scholz as “laughable,” thereby earning for him the Kremlin’s utter contempt. German-Russian relations have undergone a sharp deterioration ever since, with Germany gradually stepping up its supplies of cutting-edge lethal weaponry to Kiev and Russia, in its internal political discussions, placing Germany alongside the United States and Britain as de facto ‘co-belligerents’ which may be subjected to Russian missile attacks if the war escalates further.

At the time of the exchange of courtesies between Putin and Scholz in February, I wrote an essay in which I tried to explain the background to Russian claims of rampant Nazism in Ukraine, which sounded very odd to Westerners but found a very receptive audience among the Russian population ...

... When the Russians finally flushed out the Azov battalion extremists from their fortified positions at the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol three months into the ‘special military operation,’ they found and presented on television proof positive of the Nazi presence at the core of the Ukrainian armed forces. Ukrainian prisoners of war were stripped and the Russian camera men video-recorded their tattooed bodies, featuring not only swastikas and other German Nazi symbols but also portraits of Hitler and other Nazi leaders from the Third Reich. Western journalists, of course, saw all of this but it hardly was reported in our media. Nor has there been any reconsideration in the West of the facile dismissal of Russian concern over neo-Nazism that Scholz demonstrated. ...

... The overriding point was that the Russophobia and ‘cancel Russian culture’ movements that have swept Europe during 2022 mean that Russians are the Jews of today. They are what the Hitlerites called Untermenschen, against whom all manner of rights violations if not outright murder can be practiced. This arises in its worst form in Ukraine, where Russians as a people are systematically dehumanized in statements from the top leadership of the country.  In Ukraine, the ultra-nationalists call Russians “Colorado,” a reference to the bugs that infest potato crops. These insects carry the orange and black colors of the St George’s ribbons that patriotic Russians wear. This is the same logic that made possible the biological weapons attack on Russian soldiers in the Zaporozhie that was carried out last week by Ukrainian forces, sending the victims to intensive care treatment for botulism poisoning. That development probably did not get coverage in your daily newspaper. ...








The US will not intervene directly, because it’s not an existential crisis for Washington – it stands to lose little from Kiev’s inevitable defeat

... Fears that the Ukraine conflict is now bogged down into some sort of stalemate which risks dangerous escalation from the parties involved in order to achieve victory are misplaced. There is only one victor in the Ukraine conflict, and that is Russia. Nothing can change this reality. Renowned American intellectual John Mearsheimer has written an important article about the conflict, entitled: ‘Playing with Fire in Ukraine: The Underappreciated Risks of Catastrophic Escalation’. The article paints a dark picture about both the nature of the war in Ukraine (prolonged stalemate) and probable outcome (decisive escalation by the parties involved to stave off defeat). Mearsheimer’s underpinning premises, however, are fundamentally flawed. Russia possesses the strategic initiative – militarily, politically, and economically – when it comes to the war in Ukraine and the larger proxy engagement with NATO. Moreover, neither the US nor NATO is in a position to escalate, decisively or otherwise, to thwart a Russian victory, and Russia has no need for any similar escalation on its part. In short, the Ukraine conflict is over, and Russia has won. All that remains is a long and bloody mopping up. ...

... This is the state of American ‘ambitions’ vis-à-vis Ukraine today – all rhetoric, no meaningful action. Any fear of a US and/or NATO military intervention in Ukraine must be weighed against the reality that hot air does not generate cold steel; US politicians might be adept at filling the pages of a compliant mainstream media with impressive-sounding words, but neither the US military nor its NATO allies are able to generate the kind of meaningful military capability needed to effectively challenge Russia on the ground in Ukraine. ...



... I freely acknowledge the merit of Mearsheimer’s new article: to warn how the conflict in Ukraine could easily spin out of control and escalate to a nuclear war. The White House team of inexperienced and ignorant advisers must be shaken from their complacency and anything published in Foreign Affairs will necessarily be brought to their attention, whereas a piece published by www.antiwar.com, for example, will be burned before reading.

However, this does not excuse Mearsheimer from basing himself on the same restricted and distorted sources of information as are used by mainstream media and mainstream academics, while ignoring other sources of information that would give greater depth to his analysis and possibly change his conclusions substantially. ...


Ukraine is finished as a nation – neither side will rest in this war. The only question is whether it will be an Afghan or Syrian style finale...

..... It didn't have to be this way. Until the recent assassination of Darya Dugina at Moscow's gates, the battlefield in Ukraine was in fact under a 'Syrianization' process.

Like the foreign proxy war in Syria this past decade, frontlines around significant Ukrainian cities had roughly stabilized. 

... Moscow is well aware that any negotiation with those pulling the strings in Washington – and dictating all terms to puppets in Brussels and kyiv – is futile. The fight in Donbass and beyond is a do or die affair.

So the battle will go on, destroying what's left of Ukraine, just as it destroyed much of Syria. The difference is that economically, much more than in Syria, what's left of Ukraine will plunge into a black void. Only territory under Russian control will be rebuilt, and that includes, significantly, the bulk of Ukraine's industrial infrastructure.

What's left – rump Ukraine – has already been plundered anyway, as Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont have already bagged 17 million hectares of prime, fertile arable land – over half of what Ukraine still possesses. ...


Escobar: All the way to Odessa

Dmitry Medvedev, relishing his unplugged self, has laid down the law on the Special Military Operation (SMO). Bluntly, he affirmed there is a “one and a half” scenario: either to go all the way, or a military coup d’Etat in Ukraine followed by admitting the inevitable. No tertium applies.

That’s as stark as it gets: the leadership in Moscow is making it very clear, to internal and international audiences, the new deal consists in slow cooking the Kiev racket inside a massive cauldron while polishing its status of financial black hole for the collective West. Until we reach boiling point – which will be a revolution or a putsch.

In parallel, The Lords of (Proxy) War will continue with their own strategy, which is to pillage an enfeebled, fearful, Europe, then dressing it up as a perfumed colony to be ruthlessly exploited ad nauseam by the imperial oligarchy.

Europe is now a runaway TGV – minus the requisite Hollywood production values. Assuming it does not veer off track – a dicey proposition – it may eventually arrive at a railway station called Agenda 2030, The Great Narrative, or some other NATO/Davos denomination du jour.

As it stands, what’s remarkable is how the “marginal” Russian economy hardly broke a sweat to “end the abundance” of the wealthiest region on the planet.

Moscow does not even entertain the notion of negotiating with Brussels because there’s nothing to negotiate – considering puny Eurocrats will only be hurled away from their zombified state when the dire socio-economic consequences of “the end of abundance” will finally translate into peasants with pitchforks roaming the continent.

It may be eons away, but inevitably the average Italian, German or Frenchman will connect the dots and realize it is their own “leaders” – national nullities and mostly unelected Eurocrats – who are paving their road to poverty.

You will be poor. And you will like it. Because we are all supporting freedom for Ukrainian neo-nazis. That brings the concept of “multicultural Europe” to a whole new level.  ..... 

The SMO may be about to radically change – something that will drive the already clueless denizens of US Think Tankland and their Euro vassals even more berserk.

President Putin and Defense Minister Shoigu have been giving serious hints the only way for the pain dial is up – considering the mounting evidence of terrorism inside Russian territory; the vile assassination of Darya Dugina; non-stop shelling of civilians in border regions; attacks on Crimea; the use of chemical weapons; and the shelling of Zaporizhzhya power plant raising the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.

This past Tuesday, one day before the SMO completing six months, Crimea’s permanent representative to the Kremlin, Georgy Muradov, all but spelled it out.

He stressed the necessity to “reintegrate all the Taurian lands” – Crimea, the Northern Black Sea and the Azov Sea – into a single entity as soon as “in the next few months”. He defined this process as “objective and demanded by the population of these regions.” ....

As Eurasian integration will become an even stronger vector, Russian diplomacy will be solidifying the new normal. Never forget that Moscow had no trouble normalizing relations, for instance, with China, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel. All these actors, in different ways, directly contributed to the fall of the USSR. Now – with one exception – they are all focused on The Dawn of the Eurasian Century.



Orwellian Fare:


....... Were counter-disinformation organizations careful with how they use the term, and were their members very knowledgeable about the subjects they discuss, they might produce decent analyses. Unfortunately, they have a bad record in this regard. Rather than being neutral guardians of the truth, they tend to be guardians of a given version of the “truth,” presenting biased and inaccurate pictures of what others are saying. They also tend to display poor knowledge of the chosen topics, and the intellectual standard of their analyses can be painfully low. Consequently, their output is often so poor that it deceives the public rather than enlightens it. ...





.... I don’t know how to fight this, exactly … not my book ban, the larger phenomenon. It probably has to start with mainstream journalists and lawyers taking on these global corporations. Relatively obscure little literary outlaws (like me) do not have the juice to do it.


Make Sure You Download the Latest Ministry of Propaganda Updates

... The core mission of the Ministry of Propaganda isn't just to push a desirable narrative--it's to mystify the underlying dynamics of a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many by promoting a self-serving worldview (weltanschauung) that explains how the world works in a way that protects the interests of those in power.

As science fiction author Philip K. Dick explains in the quote below, the MoP narrative isn't just a cloak thrown over the underlying dynamics, it's the creation of an entire universe / worldview, including contexts for understanding what's going on, establishing what's valuable and what isn't, and what behaviors enhance status and which ones marginalize us. ...



The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

Think about it.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers. ...



... Naturally, the need to justify the existence of government—propaganda—evolves into techniques to disseminate that propaganda in addition to censoring opposition to it. Therefore, a proxy government is established—a front for the actual government to do what it wants to do but otherwise cannot. This also sets the stage for information control:

How to control Information:
  1. Stop ideas (censorship)
  2. Force other ideas (redirection)
  3. Justify this control (propaganda)
The US government has incentivized a group of organizations to do just that. “Big tech censorship” and other control measures were not the result of free-market phenomena. ...



One after another, people who spread information unfavorable to the Biden family, or to Biden Administration policies, get banned or suppressed on social media.  It actually started even before Biden got elected, with Twitter in October 2020 banning any re-tweet of the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, and Facebook suppressing dissemination of the same story.  But after Biden took office the examples are legion.  To name just a few:  ...

....... It turns out that those were the tip of the iceberg.  Today, the invaluable New Civil Liberties Alliance issued a press release reporting on a filing relating to discovery disputes in an ongoing matter titled State of Missouri v. Biden.  The plaintiffs in the case are the states of Missouri and Louisiana (represented by their respective Attorneys General) and a group of professors who are the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, represented by the NCLA.  The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction prohibiting the federal government from co-ordinating with the social media giants to suppress disfavored political speech.  Although the government has resisted discovery, the evidence of massive co-ordination between the government and social media companies to suppress disfavored speech is gradually coming out.  From the press release: ....



.... This is not to say that order in itself is evil or that social structures are inherently oppressive. People need boundaries because not all people are good or sane; some are vicious, some are lazy, some are crazy, some are incompetent and some are dishonest and they drag the rest of us down. Anarchy is not the solution, but neither is totalitarianism. It’s all about who sets the boundaries and how. ...

... At the core of tyranny is the removal of choice. Centralization is all about eliminating options for the public while telling them their lives will be streamlined, easier and safer. If people have options outside the establishment system or ideology then they might question the validity of the power structure. They might ask themselves “What if there is a better way than this?” ...



***** CaitOz Fare:

Cultivate A Habit Of Small Acts Of Sedition

It is not easy being someone who cares about the world and opposes the status quo. It’s a series of disheartening failures and crushing disappointments amid an endless deluge of information saying that everything is getting worse and worse.

The environment keeps degrading. Ruling power structures keep getting more and more controlling. Capitalism gets more and more imbalanced and exploitative. World powers get closer and closer to a mass military confrontation of unspeakable horror.

And what do we get when we try to oppose these things? Letdown after letdown. Politicians we support lose their elections, often after brazen interference from the very power structures we’d hoped they’d oppose. Political organizing breaks down in sectarian infighting. Activist leaders get caught up in sex scandals. Agendas we helped push for fizzle into impotence. Power wins time after time.

What passes for “the left” in the English-speaking world is basically either controlled opposition or a glorified online hobby group. Or both. The real left has been so successfully subverted by power that the mainstream public doesn’t even know what it is anymore; most think the left is either a mainstream political party that’s wholly owned and operated by the empire or a loose bunch of vaguely related ideas like having pink hair or saying your pronouns. The left really has been so successfully dismantled that it has almost been purged from memory.

Every time, at every turn, power wins and the people lose. After a while it starts to feel like you’re bashing your head against an immovable object. Some people fall down after a few hard bashes. Some don’t get back up again. Others keep bashing away, becoming harder and harder and more and more miserable and neurotic the longer they go at it.

And most people don’t even know any of this is happening, that’s what can really make it hard. You talk to your loved ones about what you’re seeing and they just get uncomfortable or look at you like you’re crazy. They don’t see the problems you’re pointing to because none of the places they’re getting their information from tell them it’s happening, because the powerful control those information sources.

As Terence McKenna put it, “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.” And as Marshall McLuhan put it, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot.”

And it sucks. No matter how you slice it, it sucks. It sucks watching this massive juggernaut slowly devour your world and see everyone’s attempts to stop it fail, and to have most people in your life not understand it or even see what it is you’re pointing to.

So what can you do? Is there a way to beat the bastards? Is there a way to stop the machine in its tracks and turn this thing around?

Well, no. Not right this moment anyway, and not by yourself. The machine’s far too big, far too entrenched, and its control over information systems means you’re not going to get help from other people in the numbers that you will need them. It’s just you and a few others against an entire globe-spanning power structure.

But that doesn’t mean you are powerless, and it doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. ...

... Do this, and then relax. Don’t expect yourself to save the world on your own. You’re only human, and there’s only one of you. You can only do what you can do, and humanity will either make the leap into health or it won’t. Just exert influence over the things you can exert influence over, and outside that little sphere of influence you’ve got to let go and let be. Don’t put any unfair or unreasonable pressures on yourself.

Perpetrate regular small acts of sedition, and then surrender to whatever life brings. I personally see many reasons to hold out hope that we can bring that machine crashing down together one day.


US Invades Syria, Kills People, Claims Self-Defense

.................. So if you’re wondering why western liberals are all waving Syrian flags and loudly condemning the US and its allies for their criminal, murderous assault on a sovereign nation, that’s why.

I am of course kidding; that is not happening. That sort of mainstream public outcry is reserved solely for the misdeeds of governments the US does not approve of, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Westerners are only encouraged to contemplate the horrors of war when it is someone else’s war. If it serves the strategic interests of the globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States, you can bomb your neighbor every week and it will barely make the news. You can even invade a country on the other side of the world and then claim you are defending yourself when they try to throw you out.



Other Quotes of the Week:

Maté: US claims to be in Syria to fight ISIS, but it rarely fights ISIS. It's actually there to deny Syria its own oil and wheat, and to occasionally attack Syrians and their allies who defeated US-backed sectarian death squads in the dirty war. 


Baud: The cultural and historical elements that determine the relations between Russia and Ukraine are important. The two countries have a long, rich, diverse, and eventful history together. This would be essential if the crisis we are experiencing today were rooted in history. However, it is a product of the present. The war we see today does not come from our great-grandparents, our grandparents or even our parents. It comes from us. We created this crisis. We created every piece and every mechanism. We have only exploited existing dynamics and exploited Ukraine to satisfy an old dream: to try to bring down Russia. Chrystia Freeland’s, Antony Blinken’s, Victoria Nuland’s and Olaf Scholz’s grandfathers had that dream; we realized it.


Raevsky: Dariia Dugina was murdered by a single Ukronazi terrorist, directed by the SBU which, in turn, is just a proxy for the CIA/MI6.  But Dariia Dugina’s innocent blood, like the blood of MILLIONS of other innocent people throughout the history is on the hands of the ruling class which pretends to see nothing while being directly involved in it all.  As for the people of the West, they have to decide whether they will continue meekly accept to be ruled my murderous, racist, thugs or whether they will resist them (or, at least, not support them and, at the very least, have the decency to decide to never knowingly support any lie). So far, I have to sadly admit that I am not very impressed.  I see a post-truth society in which the very concept of truth has lost any meaning.  That utter and total indifference to the very notion of truth is the only true “western value” left.


Garcia:  It seems like it was only a month ago that the undertakers of the Democratic Industrial Complex (DIC) were lowering shuffling old Joe Biden into his political grave before his body was even cold. But to prove that even moribund presidents can become reanimated zombies, the DIC-heads in the White House and their media scribes have suddenly changed the plot - they unearthed Joe Biden right out of the plot. They've transformed Joe Biden into a "bad-ass" monster named Dark Brandon. 


"The fuck you doing in Alberta? You fucking traitorous fucking bitch. Get the fuck out of this province! You're a fucking traitor, you fucking bitch!" 



Clown World Fare:

Larry Fitzmaurice defames JK Rowling in Buzzfeed

One of the scariest things about the current gender debate is the way in which a minority of bad actors have been allowed to re-write reality.

Someone who has become emblematic of this phenomenon is Harry Potter author JK Rowling. She made the mistake of sharing some perfectly normal and obvious opinions about gender identity and male violence back in 2020.

Since then, I’ve lost count of the number of publications and public figures that have published outrageous falsehoods about what Rowling has said or believes. The latest to join this trend of creative writing is Larry Fitzmaurice via a Buzfeed piece ...

.... The lie that JK Rowling has said something hateful about trans people has been repeated so often that people publish it on huge platforms without a second thought. As though it’s an established truism like “the sky is blue”.

Of course, you can read what JK Rowling has actually said about this issue here. It’s remarkable that a piece of writing that contains the below could be interpreted as ‘hateful’ or ‘dangerous"‘ by anyone:
I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe
JK Rowling isn’t being treated this way because she said something hateful or inaccurate. She is being demonised as a heretic for rejecting the dogmas of a new religion. This is how blasphemy is enforced in the digital era. 

We cannot allow deeply deranged an unserious people to control the narrative in this way. The stakes are too high. They are a tiny minority of activists that are completely untethered from the concept of reality and fairness. And the only power they have is the power we afford them by remaining afraid to speak up. If someone as reasonable, compassionate and clear-thinking as JK Rowling cannot be allowed to talk about this issue, then who can?

The time for biting your tongue has well and truly passed. More people agree with you than you realise. That’s why those pushing a false narrative opt for destruction instead of discussion. As the great, late Christopher Hitchens said “Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity”.



Big Thoughts:


... The studies are clear: social media is bad for you, and the more you do the worse it is. Being constantly connected, I’m almost certain, is likewise bad for you. You need space, you need time with your own feelings and thoughts when they’re not being jerked around. And if you want to think well, you need time to think alone as well in addition to time to think with other people.



small thoughts:


... Here’s my little bit of advice for all of you: send neither public congratulations nor public condolences. Text, email, or (gasp) say it in person. If you don’t know the person well enough to contact them privately, you don’t know them well enough to congratulate or console them. Right? Answer this for me: if you don’t commend them or send them condolences after an event, will they notice? Will it hurt them? If yes, it matters enough to say in private, where it will always mean more. If no, then you don’t have anything to say at all. ...



... Alright kids, tell me - who is this dynamic bad for? Why, those very people with “practical” majors, of course! They’re getting the downside of a more crowded labor market for their particular skillset and nothing in return. If you’re a young coder who wants to break into the field, you should be furious at the endless repetition of “learn to code” as a panacea for solving all of our employment woes. It’s created an army of new competition without any necessary attendant structural increase in the amount of coders the market can bear. The inevitable impact will be a tougher job market and strong headwinds on coder salaries. The overall fundamentals for the profession might mean that salaries still increase, but the immense number of new entrants into the field will still be depressing salaries. They have to. That’s how a market works. ...



... Most of all, though, I’m dreaming of a pizza oven. An outdoor pizza oven, for my backyard. I have researched, my god, have I researched, but even more I’ve dreamed. You see, a conventional home oven will rarely get you any hotter than 500° Fahrenheit, which is not ideal for pizza; lower and slower results in a denser, doughier crust, when what most of us want in pizza crust is the right combination of snap and chewiness. A dedicated pizza oven can cook at 800°F and up, sometimes even 1000°F. This allows for the gases within the dough to expand faster, giving you that signature crust of wood oven pizzas. You can get pizza stones and pizza steels, and decent pizza can be made at home in a cast iron skillet or even an ordinary cookie sheet, but for good Neapolitan, there’s no substitute for pure heat. And you can cook a pizza in a minute and a half.

(I can assure you that trying to convince me not to want a pizza oven in the comments will be a profound waste of my time and yours.)

I told someone about all of this, and he asked about the price and the procedure. So I told him all about it. He said that it all seemed expensive and like a big hassle. To which I said, precisely. Because one of the best parts of being an adult is finding that thing you love to waste money on and worry over. I know it’s not breaking new ground to say that it’s good to have a hobby, but my point here is that the wallet-draining and time-wasting elements I’m talking about today are not unfortunate side effects but the whole point. ...

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