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Monday, September 5, 2022

2022-09-05

Part III of Labour Day weekend posts:

finally caught up on a couple of weeks' missed reading for vacation; just required 3 posts!


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

Economic and Market Fare:

World food prices drop for fifth consecutive month: FAO




How Fast and Hard Can a Modern Society Collapse? Hear the Grim Story of Britain



QOTW:

Perkins: Nobody seems to believe in a soft landing, history suggests the odds are virtually zero, yet it is the only scenario that reconciles the current constellation of asset classes.

No wonder investors are confused.



fyi, upcoming:

Thursday 08 September 2022 12:00pm
Hosted by the LSE IDEAS

The role of the dollar in the global financial- and trading system has become the one of the most important topics in global economic governance and geopolitics. This has prompted new debates about the dollar’s future. In our next event, however, we look at its past and at a major economic thinker whose life and thought are hard to untangle from it.

Join the Commission’ experts for a conversation on Prof Perry Mehrling's (Boston University) latest book, 'Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System' (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The talk will be chaired by Prof Linda Yueh (LSE Ideas and Oxford) and will feature the author himself. Prof Mehrling will be joined by two distinguished discussants and experts on the dollar system: Prof Michael Pettis (Peking University) and Prof Adam Tooze (Columbia). Together they will discuss the rise of the dollar system, Kindleberger's thinking on the international financial system and the how ideas about the nature of international money developed over the last century.



Charts: 
1:


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(not just) for the ESG crowd:




— 58% of infectious diseases aggravated by climatic hazards at some point


Levels of the gas are growing at a record rate and natural sources like wetlands are the cause, but scientists don’t know how to curb it






6 Economic Experts Reveal the Truth About the Inflation Reduction Act
Is it good for your wallet? A climate bill in disguise? Landmark action or nothingburger? The Institute for New Economic Thinking assesses the Democrats’ legislative victory.



ESG QOTW:

"ESG is at its core, a feel-good scam that is enriching consultants, measurement services and fund managers, while doing close to nothing for the businesses & investors it claims to help, & even less for society."
[Prof. Aswath Damodaran, NYU's Stern School of Business]



Sci Fare:




Pics of the Week:




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Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

A senior congressional staffer quits and goes directly to work for an authoritarian foreign government — it’s legal and happens all the time.



........... Civilization will survive, because capitalism—and by extension capitalism’s survival tool of imperialism—is not immutable. It’s an increasingly decrepit system, one that’s only been able to last so long because of its reliance on imperialist parasitism. Since the beginning of the New Imperialism in the 19th century, which saw the transition from imperialism consisting of exporting goods to consisting of exporting capital, capitalism has been in a decaying stage. A stage where it’s no longer been a revolutionary force, fighting to supplant the decaying old feudal model, but a reactionary one, fighting against the threat of socialism supplanting capitalism. 

To succeed at delaying its extinction up to now, it’s needed to extract from the peripheries to bribe a comfortable minority of the workers in the imperialist countries, who’ve made up the labor aristocracy. To keep the rest of the imperial center workers from rising up, and from allying with the workers in the neo-colonies, the bourgeoisie have had to wage an intensive counterinsurgency against radical organizing. An insurgency that’s depended on undermining international proletarian solidarity by promoting anti-communist, pro-imperialist psyops, the Xinjiang genocide hoax being a recent example.

When a socioeconomic order needs to rely on parasitism, warfare against defiant countries, a cycle of endless growth that inevitably crashes and makes austerity necessary, bribery of a small global segment, and lies, it will run into the kind of crisis capitalism is experiencing now. A crisis where ever more of the world is turning against imperialism due to imperialism going against the world’s interests, and where the workers even in the core are increasingly mobilizing to gain their rights. .........



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


..... The book, Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity, is launched by the group Earth4All – convened by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Norwegian Business School, and the Club of Rome – an informal organisation dedicated to tackling critical world issues. 


In An Inconvenient Apocalypse, authors Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen write that society needs to be better prepared for an inevitable collapse

In An Inconvenient Apocalypse, authors Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen style themselves as heralds of some very bad news: societal collapse on a global scale is inevitable, and those who manage to survive the mass death and crumbling of the world as we know it will have to live in drastically transformed circumstances. According to Jackson and Jensen, there’s no averting this collapse – electric cars aren’t going to save us, and neither are global climate accords. The current way of things is doomed, and it’s up to us to prepare as best we can to ensure as soft a landing as possible when the inevitable apocalypse arrives.

“The book tries to be blunt and honest about the depth of the crisis,” said Jensen, “and to be blunt and honest about the current solutions, which do nothing to deal with the depth of the crisis.” Jackson added: “Now humanity is on a whole different journey than a gathering-hunting society. I saw that we were going to pay for this some day, and we’re going to pay in a big way.” .....



As part of the my research on the concept of a ‘poly crisis’, which is the focus of my next book, I have been reading a lot about urban systems, building codes, and other facets of the climate problem. In that vein, I have been considering the concept of – Deep Adaptation – which emerged from the work of British academic Jem Bendell in 2018. His seminal paper – Deep adaptation: a map for navigating climate tragedy – was updated in July 2020 as – Update. ....... This is where I am interested in the concept – to fully embed it within a more radical, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) focused paradigm. This is Part 1 of a series of unspecified Parts at this stage where I explore the concept of Deep Adaptation and try to extent it into the MMT world. ...........




The Truth About Carbon-Based Fuels

Let's face facts: 

Carbon-based fuels are the reason for modern society.

Carbon-based fuels have been responsible for lifting every single area of the world out of privation and dependence on the whims of weather and vagaries of wandering consumers of vegetable material (otherwise known as "meat") one region at a time -- without exception.

As the use of carbon-based fuels has been further-refined (e.g. from trees to coal to oil to natural gas) the lift in living standards has been dramatically increased, again without exception anywhere in the world.

Not one single subset of society has ever moved forward on any other basis in human history.

Ever. ......



................................... Comparing the carbon impact of a conventional fuel-driven car against that of an electric car, Aguirre (2012) found that the production of the supposedly more energy-efficient electric car requires far more energy than the production of the conventional car. This is mostly on account of the electric car’s very heavy lithium-ion battery.

Then there’s the composition of the lithium-ion battery: 80 per cent nickel, 15 per cent cobalt, 5 per cent aluminum, as well as lithium, copper, manganese, steel, and graphite. (2016 Extraordinary raw materials in a Tesla Model S’ Visual capitalist).

Industrializing electric vehicles is three to four times more energy-intensive than industrializing conventional vehicles. ...

... John Petersen’s conclusion? Electric vehicles may be technically possible, but their production will never be environmentally sustainable.  This concurs with similar research conducted along the same lines. The 2016 report by the French Environment & Energy Management Agency (ADEME) finds: ‘The energy consumption of an electric vehicle [EV] over its entire lifecycle is, on the whole, similar to that of a diesel vehicle. ......


********** Radagast: On Lifeboat Ethics
“What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”
― Pentti Linkola
A long time ago there lived a smart man, Garrett Hardin, who noticed the human population was expanding to numbers never before seen in history. And, as a smart man, he also recognized this was going to cause us trouble. So he came up with the idea of lifeboat ethics, which became popular among green thinkers who actually think, like Pentti Linkola.

Today the relevance of the concept should be obvious. We are for our entire way of life, dependent on resources that we are consuming faster than they can regenerate themselves. .....

.................................. What really happened of course, is that we imagined ourselves independent from nature, because we stumbled upon her stored fruits, stashed away deep inside the Earth: Aquifers with which we irrigate our fields, fossilized trees stored beneath our feet that we could burn, rock phosphate in Morocco, pristine soils in Africa and the Americas, etc. We behaved like children who found dad’s credit card and thought to themselves: “Gee, now we no longer have to ask dad for anything!”

We knew we were not completely independent yet, but we saw the stolen credit card as a sort of intermediate step: We’ll buy a lot of Dogecoin with it and then we’ll never have to get along with dad again. And so I’ll ask you again: What happened to all these pie-in-the-sky sources of endless energy we were supposed to get? If nuclear was the way out of this conundrum, where is the country that played its cards right? It is a bit like cryptocurrency: Every project turns out to be a disappointment, a black hole that cost you money, but the next one will be better! 

What really goes on here, is a kind of anthropocentric mental process inherent to Abrahamic religions. It’s this idea that there exists a strict boundary between humans and non-human organisms, with the latter existing solely to be exploited by human beings for our own good. And so rather than having to learn to live within the limits of a finite Earth that can not provide us with everything we want, the Earth is there for us to exploit, eventually we figure out some way to do what we wish to do on our own without the embarrassment of needing nature’s assistance and then finally we just restore nature to whatever conditions appeal to us.

We never really manage to escape this line of thinking. To suggest that there are inevitable limits to how much human greed the Earth can facilitate triggers the kind of panicky hysterical paranoia among right wing Christian types that leads them to blow up the Georgia guide stones. It’s impossible for them to imagine that this standard of living we enjoy today might genuinely be unsustainable. ......

.... The concept of lifeboat ethics, promoted half a century ago by Garrett Hardin, is lost on everyone. Your lifeboat is fragile. It can carry just a limited number of people, if you look around you, you would notice it is already succumbing under everyone’s collective weight. And yet, rather than acknowledging the nature of the crisis you are dealing with, you insist on sailing around in our little boat, looking for people to pick up from the water until you have filled it with so many people that we all drown. We will all drown, but at least nobody will get to call you racist.

And why is that? Because you fundamentally just can’t cognitively process what’s happening. You acknowledge that the crisis is real, you want a government that promises to reduce its carbon emissions. What you can’t do, is acknowledge that we’re now living in the situation we were warned about on a constant basis we would run into if we failed to heed the warnings, if we kept expanding our economies and consuming more finite resources. That’s difficult for the majority of people to cognitively process: The simple fact that you’re already living in the early days of the business as usual scenario you were warned about. Your psychological immune system prohibits you from acknowledging this.




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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


Stew Peters did an episode looking into the deaths of Canadian doctors after the vaccine mandates were rolled out. But here is new info that is even more shocking.


The significant increase in deaths is concomitant with the mRNA experiment.

The mRNA experiment will go down as the most heinous crime against humanity ever witnessed. Those that persist in its support or even its promotion would do well to look at the data that unequivocally demonstrates that the novel gene therapy is not Safe or Effective™.




There is a higher mortality rate than normal, what is going on here?





This article will attempt to show that excess deaths, seen in statistics of many highly-vaccinated countries, are only beginning to show up and are likely to get worse over time......



A new peer-reviewed study found that regular use of ivermectin reduced the risk of dying from COVID-19 by 92%. The large study was conducted by Flávio A. Cadegiani, MD, MSc, PhD. Cadegiani is a board-certified endocrinologist with a master’s degree and doctorate degree in clinical endocrinology. The peer-reviewed study was published on Wednesday by the online medical journal Cureus. 



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What Does This Mean?
I suspect at least one of the three following scenarios is occurring:

•The federal government (and deep state) suddenly decided they needed to end COVID-19 and is making a full reversal on this policy. Keep in mind that the language in many of the news article I have reviewed (such as Fauci’s above 11/14/21 statement) argue that these actions are being taken because of the arbitrary decision that the pandemic is “over.”

•Polling has determined the current pandemic response is no longer sustainable (either due to the economic costs of it, public disapproval of the policies, or lack of support from the business community and federal work force).

•The key officials involved in the pandemic response are now seriously concerned about the criminal liability they will face for their complicity in the pandemic response and pushing the vaccines on the public, and are pursuing a strategy of resigning so that when public outrage explodes, the public’s focus (and perusal of criminal liability) will not be directed towards them since they no longer occupy these positions.

In turn, I suspect the following is causing these scenarios to emerge:

•As time progresses, the issues with the vaccines will become more evident and harder to ignore. This is partly due to them effectively being designed to fail (so as time moves forward, they will become less and less effective until the vaccinated end up having a higher risk of COVID-19 than the vaccinated), and partly due to the vaccine toxicity (and risk of sudden death) increasing with time due to the continual synthesis of spike protein from mRNA that resists being metabolized within the body.

•The move for criminal indictments against the perpetrators such as Fauci appears to be gaining steam. The legal approaches to prevent these crimes from occurring in the future are critical to understand and was the focus of a recent article. The officials who have pushed the pandemic policies and COVID vaccines on the public have repeatedly been warned they can face criminal liability for their actions, and I am hopeful the tide has shifted enough that they are now highly worried about this possibility.

What Should Be Done Next?

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Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

So you have the insurance industry geniuses and Wall Street geniuses who crunched the data, and they now have undeniable evidence of what's caused most of the global #excessdeaths - Amazingly simple in the end & no need to listen to medical, pharma, govnmt or media anymore. 1/.. 


Here is the link to the Actuaries report contributes to by 80% of the USA insurance industry. 





Anecdotal Fare:

Here's what silenced healthcare workers from all over the world want you to know and why they aren't able to speak out directly.


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


This week's summary of (what seem to be) NON-fatal "vaccination" injuries, or "side effects," throughout the world (also including Italy, Russia and Australia)



COVID Corporatocracy / Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

"Manufactured pandemics are now mammoth investment opportunities that increase the wealth of billionaires and further consolidate their power." Part 1

“Put simply, Covid-19 was not an epidemiological event, it was a money laundering scheme, a smoke screen for economic/social restructuring towards total control and a massive psychological operation among a few other items.

“Two and a half years later, as bureaucrats and politicians wind down the Covid restrictions in order to quell growing unrest, we can be assured they will insist on retaining the “right” to re-impose them at will........


Centralisation of Economic and Political Control: Catherine Austin-Fitts puts it altogether and it leads to one place - slavery. The antidote: stop building the transhumanist system for "Mr Global"!

Why?
Because slavery is good business. Slavery is the most profitable business in the history of the world. If you now have the technological capability of implementing slavery… their attitude, I think, is yeah, let’s do it!

“Mr Global” [the secret committee that runs the world] is using technology to move to a system where a few people can control the many with far less headaches and fear.
How?
  1. Economic totalitarianism. Migration from dollar global reserve to new monetary system (the end of currencies, an all-digital solution) so as to hide the fact that “Mr Global” has stolen all the money.
  2. Healthcare crisis - manufactured to usher in the new monetary system without the minions realising the real objective.
  3. Reaction to healthcare crisis designed to destroy small businesses to concentrate control in fewer, larger enterprises - an economic war, not a fight against a virus.
  4. Disaster capitalism - creating a disaster to devalue property so that Mr Global can buy the cheap assets.
  5. Technocracy - AI and robotics → get the humans to teach the robots how to do their jobs. Humans, as a natural resource, aren’t needed any more.
  6. Media (propaganda) - used to distil fear to serve the agenda.
  7. Immigration - designed to cause disruption to indigenous societies.
  8. Surveillance - built into systems claimed to be “for your protection”.
  9. Transhumanism - physical connection of the person to the system so they are easier to monitor and control (social credit) = a new system of slavery.
  10. Consolidation of global power into the already most powerful nations (G7).
There is hope!

TRANSPARENCY CAN BLOW THE GAME .......


Enjoy Your Universal Income, Stop Working, and Shut Up


********** Spartacast 04
The rage grows

.... This is infuriating. We were already at a tipping point, months ago, where the number of vaccine-injured should’ve been obvious enough to force the immediate cessation of the vaccination campaign.

And yet, governments worldwide are persistent in their use of coercion to try and convince people to take unproven nucleic acid vaccines with a laundry list of horrendous side effects.

The ruling class are at war with humanity. The Pirbright Institute, the Wellcome Trust, the Tavistock Institute, Sequoia Capital, Rosemont Seneca, the CIA, USAID, DARPA, DTRA, EcoHealth Alliance, Metabiota, Labyrinth Global Health, the so-called One Health initiative and the Global Virome Project; all are linked together in what I’ve come to call the BDM, or Biodefense Mafia.

In the US, they’ve greatly expanded civilian biodefense and then outsourced it to foreign countries while letting military biodefense spending remain static. For years, USAMRIID and the like were in a sorry state. They just don’t need the military labs anymore. Not when they can do the same work in dozens of civilian labs on the other side of the planet where the money is funneled in by Quasi-NGOs acting as front organizations for spying agencies, none of the lab technicians speak English, and no one will blow the whistle. Our governments have sought zero-accountability, zero-transparency biolab capacity for years. There have been very little in the way of watchdog organizations to try and root this out and get these people to explain why they’re doing this in secret, in utter contempt of the public and our safety. Ed Hammond and the Sunshine Project tried to shed light on it, but they went under in 2008 because they couldn’t get enough funding. Did the expansion of the biolab capacity stop, in the interim? On the contrary. It increased.

Mark my words, the Round Table and the Olympians were responsible for all of this. Everything I have seen so far points straight back at the Club of Rome, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee of 300, and their many front organizations. Their specific goal in mind is undoubtedly mass mind control, likely patterned off DARPA’s wireless BCI research. The virus is a ruse. A bit of misdirection. It exists to justify the shots. The endless vaccines and booster shots, in turn, give the ruling class a foot in the door to inject basically anything into anyone, anywhere, at any time, including cutting-edge nanotechnology that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Their agenda is hidden in plain sight, between DARPA’s Brain Initiative, bioethicists openly discussing “Cognitive Warfare” at West Point, and the World Economic Forum casually posting articles on the Internet of Bodies and human augmentation. The aim here is, quite clearly, to violate people’s right to privacy and human autonomy in an unprecedented manner. .................................

.............. It just goes to show that people don’t know their history. They can look at Unit 731, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, MKULTRA, the Phoenix Program, COINTELPRO, Iran-Contra, and the CIA torture reports out of Gitmo, all the decades of human experimentation and wanton murder and mutilation of innocent people, and they can say to themselves and others, with a straight face, “Sure, governments did bad things in the past, but they’re okay now”. ...........

... I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but there is an article, doing the rounds on Twitter right now, where a twelve-year-old girl had forty percent of the skin on her body start falling off due to a rare autoimmune reaction after a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. There are undoubtedly thousands of small children walking around, on this planet, right now, with subclinical myopericarditis caused by the mRNA vaccines, whose parents don’t realize that their kids may drop dead within four years. So brutal and all-encompassing is this genocide, the so-called authorities have forbidden us to speak of it, characterizing those who do as bloodthirsty malcontents sowing the seeds of doubt and dissent, or as agents of foreign powers. .......



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

Sachs: The west’s false narrative about Russia and China

.... The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandisement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. ...


A Six Month Retrospective

With the Russo-Ukrainian War now rolling on into its seventh month, I thought this might be as good a time as any to put together a more extensive analysis than the twitter format allows. What follows will be my assessment of what exactly the Russian Armed Forces have achieved, why they made specific operational choices, and the general shape of the battlefield today. ...............

............. In short, because Ukraine has little indigenous production and logistics, the west is bearing the actual industrial and financial burden of the war for them, and this burden is becoming far heavier than western planners expected. The logic of the proxy has been reversed; Ukraine has become a vampiric force, draining the west of equipment and munitions.

On the other side of the coin, the logic of sanctions rebounded strongly against the west. Western governments hoped that a rapid, all-in sanctions regime against Russia would crush the Russian economy and turn the Russian people against the war. The second part of this assumption was always silly – Russians blame the west, not Putin, for sanctions. Even more importantly, however, it is clear that Russia’s economic planning for this war bore tremendous fruit.

At the risk of massively oversimplifying the economics, the Eurasian vs Western economic rift that is emerging is a contest between a bloc that is rich in materials and a bloc rich in dollars. Attempts to financially strangulate Russia have so far failed, both due to the competence of Russia’s central bank, and due to the basic fact (which should be trivially obvious) that a county which makes its own energy, food, and weapons will always be difficult to pressure. The western sanctions regime was largely doomed from the start, because Europe simply cannot embargo the energy products that are the main source of Russian revenue. .......


We are pleased to bring you this fresh interview with Jacques Baud, in which we cover what is now happening in the geopolitical struggle that is the Ukraine-Russia war. As always, Mr. Baud brings deep insight and clear analysis to the conversation.

TP: It is commonly said in the West that this war has “proven” that the Russian army is feeble and that its equipment is useless. Are these assertions true?

JB: No. After more than six months of war, it can be said that the Russian army is effective and efficient, and that the quality of its command & control far exceeds what we see in the West. But our perception is influenced by a reporting that is focused on the Ukrainian side, and by distortions of reality.

Firstly, there is the reality on the ground. It should be remembered that what the media call “Russians” is in fact a Russian-speaking coalition, composed of professional Russian fighters and soldiers of the popular militias of Donbass. The operations in the Donbass are mainly carried out by these militias, who fight on “their” terrain, in towns and villages they know and where they have friends and family. They are therefore advancing cautiously for themselves, but also to avoid civilian casualties. Thus, despite the claims of western propaganda, the coalition enjoys a very good popular support in the areas it occupies.

Then, just looking at a map, you can see that the Donbass is a region with a lot of built-up and inhabited areas, which means an advantage for the defender and a reduced speed of progress for the attacker in all circumstances. ......

... Thirdly, our “experts” have themselves determined the objectives of the Russian offensive. By claiming that Russia wanted to take over Ukraine and its resources, to take over Kiev in two days, etc., our experts have literally invented and attributed to the Russians objectives that Putin never mentioned.  .....






Armstrong: Mikhail Gorbachev



Orwellian Fare:


... The western propaganda we’re currently experiencing is nothing new. Today’s President Putin joins yesterday’s Middle East “monsters” as current Ukrainian Nazi militias become “freedom fighters” and the Russians become “Nazis.” Likewise, the previous Middle Eastern terrorist groups became “moderate Islamist’s” but only if they were fighting for a US led NATO in Iraq and Syria. Yet such is the power of belief on an already stupefied majority western population that it’s become factual. 

In our upside down world, reality has long vanished to 15% of our western leaders who regard themselves as the “international community.” On August 24th, only 54 countries out of 193 supported a UN resolution which condemned Russia for not stopping its intervention in the Ukraine, which begs the question of why, if the majority population loathe today’s western politicians, do they passionately and often even fanatically believe their every word? .....


(Just kidding, you're really a peasant stuck down in the village with other the peasants)

Preface: If you haven’t already, read Kafka’s “The Castle.” Read his “The Trial.” If you have time afterwards, check out Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” and “Bend Sinister.” These absurdist works shed more light, more accurately, on the ground-level reality of our modern condition, then almost everything else since put together. Hannah Arendt’s work on totalitarianism is absolutely key to understanding our world. It’s the analytical, dead spot-on explanation of the road to, and methodology of, this predicament in which you and I are stuck, and stuck at the bottom, and which is illustrated by the novelists mentioned. .......


Desmet: The Psychology of Totalitarianism
From rationalism to mass formation - and towards Truth speech.


Grid takes a comprehensive look at culture wars and censorship in America’s public learning spaces.



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


None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

None are more hopelessly ignorant than those who falsely believe they’re informed.

None are more hopelessly propagandized than those who don’t know they are propagandized.

Living in a liberal western democracy means having the freedom to criticize the tyranny of your government, but instead spending your time criticizing the tyranny of foreign governments who your government doesn’t like.

Free speech in a liberal western democracy means you have the freedom to say whatever you want about the abuses of your government, and the press has the freedom to hammer you with propaganda to ensure that you never do.

In a liberal western democracy you are free to criticize your government, but instead you are propagandized into criticizing the impotent puppets who get rotated in and out of office while your government continues doing all the same evil things regardless of who gets elected. ........

... “If we were being propagandized, I’m sure we’d have heard about it in the news,” we tell ourselves.

But the news is the propaganda. And it will never report on that bombshell story. ....


Ukraine In The Membrane: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
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Make no mistake, the US is being entirely pragmatic in its Ukraine proxy war. It gets to shore up control over its European vassals, preoccupy Russia and bleed its coffers, expand its military, advance its information interests, and all it costs is a little pretend empire money.

So of course the empire provoked this war and sabotaged peace at every opportunity. Of course it did. Why wouldn’t it? It stood everything to gain and very little to lose. I mean, unless you count greatly increasing the possibility of nuclear annihilation

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We need to get a handle on this climate thing so we can leave a healthy world for our children, our children’s children, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s ex-girlfriends.



People on Twitter are currently raging because the account for the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire tweeted a post celebrating the anniversary of the death of John McCain, which is a good opportunity to explain why everyone who dances on McCain’s grave is right and why anyone who admonishes them for doing so is wrong.

The reason it’s good and important to celebrate the deaths of war sluts who facilitated mass military slaughter is because it helps bring clarity and proportionality to the horrors of war. You’re making it clear that John McCain’s victims matter more than his daughter’s feelings.

The fact that celebrating the death of war criminals is met with outrage is itself evidence that it’s something that needs to be done. If the public is so blind to the horrors of war that politeness is seen as a higher priority, those horrors need consciousness brought to them.

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Democrats rehabilitated George W Bush out of political necessity. If you don’t turn him into a cuddly wuddly old painter who hates the far right and frolics with Ellen DeGeneres, you can’t support Democrats like Joe Biden who backed all of Bush’s most evil actions to the hilt.



.......... You know you are living in an oligarchy when Mark Zuckerberg has more political influence over your country than any elected official. Democracy is an illusion. Those who live under the US empire are a propagandized and politically impotent population who only think they are free because they’ve been given the illusion of freedom, and less and less effort is being made to sustain that illusion.

We are ruled by unelected sociopaths who have no wisdom, no compassion, and no intention of ever relinquishing their rule. This will continue unless and until enough of us wake up to what’s going on to stop them.





Other Quotes of the Week:

Tucker: The CDC was founded in 1947 to spray the country with DDT. Later, the agency moved on from killing mosquitos to killing science, hope, and freedom itself.




Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Hanania: How I Overcame Anxiety

Do you want to be like me? Do you want to be able to say whatever you want, constantly troll people, and get them to hate you with a passion, with all of this having no impact on your mental stability or functioning as you snort at them with contempt? Probably not. But if you’re like most people, you probably wish you had more confidence and peace of mind. 

I wasn’t always like this. Growing up, I had what any psychiatrist would have classified as crushing social anxiety and depression. Talking to people for short periods of time would cause rapid hard palpitations and was generally unpleasant, so I avoided interacting with others when possible. But I felt in the back of my mind that I should have social experiences, so I tried to force them, and you can imagine how poorly that turned out. I would say that while as a teenager I was probably in the top 5% of the population in social anxiety and self-doubt, today I am now easily in the bottom 5%. No one can with certainty know other people’s mental states, but I think most individuals have enough of a theory of mind to compare themselves to others, and based on my experiences I have an extremely high level of confidence in those estimates.

I share the basic outlines of my story and some mental hacks I have found useful in the hope that this essay can be of benefit to others. ...



Rigger-ous Fare:


I have trained my eldest daughter well. I have managed to get her to appreciate the majestic and subtle art of the “Dad joke”. So much so, that she now sends me some fine examples, like the following

If you eat your tin-foil hat, do you sheet metal?

Although my personal favourite takes a lot of beating

Why are the Norwegians putting barcodes on their battleships? So they can Scandinavian.

It’s not all just mindless fun, though. As a result of this last joke I watched a documentary on how they built battleships. It was riveting. 

Humour is not only a great antidote to the madness, it’s also one of the things that draw us together as human beings. Yes, there is a lot of suffering in the World, there are many things to be worried about, but a smile a day keeps the bullshit away.

And we’re drowning in shit. Not the terrible plague of cow poop and methane the greater Greta graters would have us believe is an existential threat to humanity, but the monsoon of manure from the loose bowels of the woke movement. ...



Satirical Fare:




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