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Thursday, September 8, 2022

2022-09-08

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

Economic and Market Fare:

In the decades before the pandemic, tailwinds from geopolitics, technology, globalisation and demographics made aggregate supply highly responsive to aggregate demand. This delivered solid GDP growth and low inflation, even as stalling structural reforms weighed on productivity. Increasingly reliant on fiscal and monetary stimulus to sustain output, economies became fragile. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine painfully revealed the supply side fault lines, leading to decades-high inflation in much of the world. In the coming years, many of the disinflationary tailwinds are set to turn into headwinds. This calls for a more balanced approach to policymaking, recognising the limits of demand side policies, and a commitment to revitalising aggregate supply.



There is a reason why despite fundamentals, yields and newsflow screaming for lower prices, US equities simply refuse to sell off: it's because investors know that the moment the Fed pivots dovish and capitulates on its tightening cycle (a move which could take place at any moment since it is as much political as it is financial), risk will explode limit up. And so, even though the US is sliding into a recession - or rather because the US is sliding into a recession - stocks remain sticky to the upside, waiting for the inevitable pivot.

And an advance look of what said pivot would look like came this morning from Australia, where bond yields tumbled and stocks soared after the country's top central banker opened the door on Thursday to slowing the bank's policy tightening after five rate increases in as many months, sparking a rally in bonds as markets scaled back bets on further aggressive moves.


Munchau: The trend is a curve, not a line
Europe maybe at the beginning of an unusually severe recession, one that won't auto-reverse

...... There are no policy tools that can stop the recession. Nor will the recession itself take care of inflation, for reasons outlined last weekend by Agustin Carstens, the general manager of the Bank for International Settlements. Our over-generous fiscal and monetary policies have created excess demand, and while supply conditions will ease, they will not return to the status quo ante.



It is extremely hard to understand the mass psychosis at work among European leadership. A huge energy crisis, driven by the great reduction in Russia gas supplies (to become 100% if the EU proceeds with its idea of a gas price cap) and set to be compounded by the G7 bright idea, which they are refusing to drop, of a cap on the price of Russian oil. To the extent that idea works, it will work in reverse. 

..... European leaders are refusing and/or unable to recognize the severity and speed of decay There is simply no fix that will meaningfully alleviate the loss of access to so much cheap energy so quickly. It doesn’t matter what combination of subsidies and prohibitions the EU tries to implement. The economy can’t absorb electricity and gas prices at their expected levels. 

.... Third, ultimately the end for higher energy prices is that they do kill demand. But to kill demand enough to lower energy use to available supply will kill most of these economies stone cold dead.

Again, the only way to prevent devastation is to make up with Russia ....

... It seems at best that these officials are grasping at straws like one widely circulated but analytically rotten analysis claiming the Russian economy is on the verge of collapse1.

The only solution would be to make some sort of peace with Russia, and the current crop of officials are simply too deeply invested, emotionally and politically, in Russia/Putin demonization to do that. The UK and EU economies will be bleeding out before voters can turf out this self-serving bunch.









Mish: Increasingly Likely That Alleged Job Strength is a Mirage of Part Time Second Jobs
Strong job gains? Don't count on it!


... While the market mills around, I’ve become convinced that any decided move significantly higher, including breaching all time highs again, isn’t going to happen without a Fed pivot. Otherwise, the market will likely stay in ebb-and-flow mode for the time being. If inflation starts to come down, we could see a bit more of a risk on environment, but the fact is that if Jerome Powell means what he says and says what he means regarding his monetary policy stance going forward, I still think we’re going to see capitulation at some point.

As a reminder, many people saw the days leading up to last week’s speech as an opportunity to be optimistic - they thought Powell would finally start to indicate to the market that the Fed was easing. Instead, the opposite happened.

So the market is already likely in a dazed state of semi-surprise. And if the Fed follows through, there is no doubt in my mind we are still in for a market crash. As I’ve said in numerous past articles, the fact that we have hiked so much so quickly will eventually lead to a “surprise” shock to equity markets.

That surprise may very well pop up in September or October, when the Fed’s QT hits “full stride”



Quotes of the Week:

“The fed has to hike until they break something”
They’ve already broken plenty of things
Just because SPY isn’t below 1000 doesn’t mean they aren’t causing dangerous amounts of stress in the financial system


Charts: 
1:



Bubble Fare:

***** Grantham: ENTERING THE SUPERBUBBLE’S FINAL ACT

Executive Summary
Only a few market events in an investor’s career really matter, and among the most important of all are superbubbles. 1 These superbubbles are events unlike any others: while there are only a few in history for investors to study, they have clear features in common.One of those features is the bear market rally after the initial derating stage of the decline but before the economy has clearly begun to deteriorate, as it always has when superbubbles burst. This in all three previous cases recovered over half the market’s initial losses, luring unwary investors back just in time for the market to turn down again, only more viciously, and the economy to weaken. This summer’s rally has so far perfectly fit the pattern.The U.S. stock market remains very expensive and an increase in inflation like the one this year has always hurt multiples, although more slowly than normal this time. But now the fundamentals have also started to deteriorate enormously and surprisingly: between COVID in China, war in Europe, food and energy crises, record fiscal tightening, and more, the outlook is far grimmer than could have been foreseen in January. Longer term, a broad and permanent food and resource shortage is threatening, all made worse by accelerating climate damage.The current superbubble features an unprecedentedly dangerous mix of cross-asset overvaluation (with bonds, housing, and stocks all critically overpriced and now rapidly losing momentum), commodity shock, and Fed hawkishness. Each cycle is different and unique – but every historical parallel suggests that the worst is yet to come.



(not just) for the ESG crowd:



About 26 per cent of the Amazon rainforest has already been lost or badly degraded and without intervention the rest could transform into savannah, says a report on its status



The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica—about the size of Florida—has been an elephant in the room for scientists trying to make global sea level rise predictions.

This massive ice stream is already in a phase of fast retreat (a "collapse" when viewed on geological timescales) leading to widespread concern about exactly how much, or how fast, it may give up its ice to the ocean.

The potential impact of Thwaites' retreat is spine-chilling: a total loss of the glacier and surrounding icy basins could raise sea level from 3 to 10 feet. 

A new study in Nature Geoscience led by marine geophysicist Alastair Graham at the University of South Florida's College of Marine Science adds cause for concern.  ...


As the US remains “grossly unprepared” to meet the exponential increase in demand for lithium, it stakes a claim to Argentina’s massive deposits of “white gold.” All for Argentina’s benefit, of course. 

.... By 2020, China controlled 76% of global lithium-ion battery production capacity, while the US accounted for just 8%. As Jalife points out, between 2018 and 2021 China spent twice as much money securing lithium mining rights as the four main economies of the Anglosphere (US, UK, Canada and Australia) combined.

Now, the US and its five-eye allies are having to play catch up. Much of their attention will be on Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, the three South American nations whose borders intersect in the highly-elevated salt flats basins known as “the lithium triangle.” This area not only accounts for roughly two-thirds of the world’s known reserves of lithium; its lithium is also much easier to extract than many other deposits. It is here where the biggest campaigns of what Jalife calls the “lithium war” will probably be waged. Asked by a listener whether this will mean more coups d’รฉtat in the region, Jalife responded, with a wry, weary smile:
Yes, we need to have them on the radar. And attacks. We are going to see some strange accidents. Yep, same as always. The setting is the same,… it’s the resources that are different. This time they are strategic.
...


The energy historian who says rapid decarbonization is a fantasy

Vaclav Smil rarely agrees to interviews. Too many in the media have portrayed him as a tool of Big Oil, he says — because he insists on pointing out how deeply dependent humanity is on fossil fuels and how difficult it will be to give them up.

The economist and professor emeritus at Canada’s University of Manitoba heats his house with solar energy. He’s no global warming denier. He recognizes the need to move away from plastics, but asks readers to note how often they touch plastic every day and ask themselves how rapid they think the switch can be.

His mission: lay out facts. “I’m not an optimist or a pessimist,” he likes to say. “I’m a scientist.” ...

... In managing our energy affairs we should constantly favor doable steps: not wasting 40% of our food grown with high energy expense, not to heat or cool the universe in poorly designed but oversize houses, not to waste fuel and materials driving SUVs (nearly two tons of mass to move, usually, a single body), not to design cities that demand lengthy commutes, not to keep amassing rarely used products, not to travel mindlessly.

Instead we continue, and expand, our wasteful ways while trying to come up with miraculous — and in the near-term most unlikely — solutions, everything from running on hydrogen to controlled fusion. Good luck with that. .......


A short history of the successes and failures of the international climate change negotiations





Other Fare:


......... That is, simply put, a fantasy. No empirical revolution accompanied the Chicago School’s takeover of antitrust policy. Rather, economists and policymakers of a different persuasion were marginalized from the field and excluded from decision-making positions at antitrust agencies and in the judiciary, and the ex-post rationale of empirical discrediting cooked up more recently to paper over what was in fact an ideological and political power play.


Purpose-built sustainable communities can boost energy efficiency and support an ageing population.

By 2050, nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, up from just over half in 2020. Urbanization is nothing new, but an effort is under way across many high-income countries to make their cities smarter, using data, instrumentation and more efficient resource management. In most of these nations, the vast majority of smart-city projects involve upgrades to existing infrastructure. Japan stands out for its willingness to build smart communities from scratch as it grapples with a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce, meaning that there are fewer people of working age to support older people.


Upon the passing of Frank Drake, 1930-2022, some thoughts on the Drake Equation, the length of civilizations, and the uniqueness of our species

The pioneering astronomer Frank Drake has died at the age of 92. With the possible exception of Carl Sagan and Jill Tarter, Frank Drake did more than any scientist to not only popularize the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but to metamorphose it from science fiction to science fact, most notably through his eponymous Drake Equation. The New York Times obit for Dr. Drake is brief but poignant in its biographical highlights, and much longer histories and biographies are sure to come. He was a giant and deserves a full-length biographical treatment, inasmuch as there are few questions more profound than “Are we alone in the cosmos?” And Frank Drake devoted his life to answering the question as any rigorous scientist would—by searching for evidence and considering the question through rigorous ratiocination. ...


Jumping spiders rapidly move their eyes and twitch during rest, suggesting they have visual dreams, never before observed in arachnids.


Fun Fare:





Pics of the Week:











Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

The grim events that took place at historical sites such as Ghana’s Elmina Castle made all of us.



There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in grotesque income inequality and political stagnation.

Decades in the making, this disconnect has extinguished American democracy. The steady stripping away of economic and political power was ignored by a hyperventilating press that thundered against the barbarians at the gate — Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, ISIS, Vladimir Putin — while ignoring the barbarians in our midst. The slow-motion coup is over. Corporations and the billionaire class have won. There are no institutions, including the press, an electoral system that is little more than legalized bribery, the imperial presidency, the courts or the penal system, that can be defined as democratic. Only the fiction of democracy remains. 

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism calls our system “inverted totalitarianism.” The faรงade of democratic institutions and the rhetoric, symbols and iconography of state power have not changed. The Constitution remains a sacred document. The U.S. continues to posit itself as a champion of opportunity, freedom, human rights and civil liberties, even as half the country struggles at subsistence level, militarized police gun down and imprison the poor with impunity, and the primary business of the state is war. 

This collective self-delusion masks who we have become — a nation where the citizenry has been stripped of economic and political power and where the brutal militarism we practice overseas is practiced at home. ....



When Joe Biden was running for president in 2020, he promised to raise the federal minimum wage for workers from $7.25, where it’s sat since 2009, to $15 an hour.  Today, despite his promise and surging inflation, the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25.

My Democratic friends tell me that Biden wants to keep his promise and that it’s not his fault that nothing has been done.  Senators Manchin and Sinema are obstructing him.  Senate parliamentary procedures are roadblocks too.  Poor Joe Biden.  He’s the “leader of the free world,” the most powerful person in America, but his powers are limited by recalcitrant members of his own party, who are blocking Lunch Bucket Joe from helping workers across America.

I’m not buying it.  Occam’s Razor applies here.  Since 2009, the Democratic Party hasn’t raised the minimum wage because the leadership hasn’t wanted to. ...




The Biden Administration Drones On



No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation’s war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design. On Aug. 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general.

Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require congressional approval. Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the CDC in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts.

The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor. The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions.


Are we the meal that likes to be eaten?


After an investment firm bought St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged, in Richmond, Virginia, the company reduced staff, removed amenities, and set the stage for a deadly outbreak of COVID-19.



...

part of long tweet thread, including



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:




This is Part 2 of a series on Deep Adaptation and MMT that I am writing. The first part – Deep Adaptation – Part 1 (August 22, 2022) – introduced the concept. I have recently written about the coming together of a number of crises which I consider to be all linked and part of the end of normal business as we have known it. See – The global poly crisis is the culmination of the absurdity of neoliberalism (July 18, 2022). Thinking about the social aspects of that conjunction of crises, we understand that advancing material prosperity is still a goal that we should seek to achieve for millions of the globe’s citizens, who live in abject poverty with little food and housing security. But then, when we consider the ecological dimension we see immediately how the social goals have to be solved within a constrained envelope of overall material deprivation. The question then is how can we move forward towards achieving that duality. There are various propositions out there – Green New Deals, Green Growth, etc. I think they are all flawed and that proponents tend to become captured by the power relations that have created the current mess. That is where I think the concept of Deep Adaptation comes into play. Which brings me to a starting point in understanding where these institutionalised ‘green’ conservations have lost their way. Today, I am writing about growth and degrowth, because there are a lot of misunderstandings out there about this apparent conflict. ....


Reversing the Freight Train

..... More recently, the accusation has been that the economics of growth and the policies they underwrite confuse the quantitative process of growth for the qualitative process of development. Today, we know that countries whose per capita GDP is the highest or which grow the fastest aren’t necessarily more peaceful or more democratic; neither do their citizens necessarily live healthier, longer or happier lives. Despite all this, GDP remains the standard measure of aggregate national economic activity, much to the chagrin of proponents of such alternatives as the Human Development Index or the Genuine Progress Indication, which do make some attempt to gauge human wellbeing.

The precipitous decline in the planet’s ecological stability, associated in particular with climate change, has turbocharged the critique of growth. It is becoming accepted wisdom that modern capitalism’s relationship with the planet is increasingly extractive and destructive. A lunatic fringe refusing to ‘believe’ in climate change may not yet have bumbled off the edge of the earth, but the facts are now part of mainstream consciousness. Even the likes of the International Monetary Fund, the Financial Times, the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bank and the US military now acknowledge that modern economic growth has been ecologically destructive, and is a principal driver of the looming climate cataclysm.

The critical question is whether our current concatenation of crises is a product of the current mode of economic growth, or of economic growth per se. Is it possible to pursue economic growth in a way that doesn’t make things worse for the planet and its inhabitants: can we, as they say, ‘decouple’ growth from greenhouse gas emissions, the decline in biodiversity and the destruction of habitats?

The prophets of decoupling belong to a motley but expanding crew of green-growthers, including financiers such as the former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, economists including Per Espen Stoknes of the Norwegian Business School and Mariana Mazzucato of University College London, and business gurus like Paul Hawken (co-author, with Hunter and Amory Lovins, of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, published in 1999). The green-growthers’ pitch is an appeal to the magic of innovation and technology. Self-described ‘techno-optimists’, such as the Financial Times columnist Martin Sandbu, are vocal proponents of market-based climate policy (like carbon taxes and tradeable permit schemes), ‘innovation economies’ and ‘net-zero’ pledges: corporate and government commitments to large-scale projects that would supposedly allow us to continue business basically as usual while offsetting emissions with carbon capture and storage, tree-planting, and other carbon-sequestration programmes.

This is also the message we hear from advocates of the European Green Deal and renewable energy entrepreneurs. Once we get the right kind of growth – ‘healthy growth’ decoupled from capitalism’s sordid environmental record – we won’t have to worry about there being too much growth, and indeed should welcome it as the path to a more ‘inclusive’ capitalism and the means of paying for the coming transition to a high-tech, low-carbon world. ‘Yes,’ Stoknes says, ‘the current version of capitalism may be wreaking havoc, but it’s not that capitalism is broken.’ In fact, he claims, ‘denying the human psyche its subconscious yearning for growth’ would be disastrous.

There is a no-nonsense realism behind some of the green-growthers’ hopes for decoupling: growth-driven capitalism is what we’ve got; it isn’t going away anytime soon; let’s cross our fingers and work with it. One gets the sense that this is where Carney, now UN special envoy on climate action and finance, has ended up. He has rallied virtually every significant financial institution in the world (commanding between them some $130 trillion in total assets) to form the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, with the aim of mobilising private sector financing for a ‘global transition’ to net zero by 2050. But the initiative seems driven more by desperation than hope. The same might be said of Mazzucato’s exhortation to ‘do capitalism differently’. It’s as if time is so short, and human nature so rigid, that we have no other choice.

The realists tend to want more involvement from the state than green business boosters would like, precisely because they don’t trust the invisible hand to deliver what’s needed: a market-based escape from environmental disaster. Sometimes this position is presented as if it were above politics: whatever one feels about growth or alternatives to it, the unlikeliness of our being able to slow down the capitalist train in time compels the deployment of such emergency measures as national ‘mobilisation’ – analogous to the planned economy of the Second World War – or planetary interventions such as atmospheric solar radiation management.

‘Degrowth’ is the term now most closely associated with those who argue that the promise of green growth is at best a distraction, at worst an anaesthetic, cynically administered. In Less Is More, probably the best-known statement of the case for degrowth, Jason Hickel delivers a belated response to Rostow: ‘Compound interest is incompatible with sustaining life on a delicately balanced living planet.’ We cannot grow our way out of our predicament: growth is growth is growth. As Tim Jackson puts it in Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, ‘Growth means more throughput’ – the flow, in absolute terms, of energy and materials in the production process. ‘More throughput means more impact. More impact means less planet. Endless growth – green or not – can only end up leading to no growth at all. There is no growth on a dead planet.’ The mythology of decoupling is, as he puts it, a ‘form of denial’.

Degrowthers call instead for purposeful and managed economic shrinkage, the rationale for which is straightforward: economic growth is destroying life on earth. ....


************ Radagast: The nuclear delirium

About half a year ago I wrote “The collapse of the They/Them empire“, where I explained that feminized Western elites behave like a clique of high school girls, who live under the mistaken impression that physical reality doesn’t matter and only control over the diffusion of information does. Banning Russia from SWIFT was part of an attempt to deal with Russia the way they would deal with Alex Jones: “You’re not allowed to use our platforms anymore!”

It’s the fundamental lack of respect for the limitations of physical reality, that’s going to be our deathbed. ......................................

The problem here is just a mentality: A refusal to accept that there are limits to human prosperity, that you can’t have everything your heart desires. And as you dig your heels deeper into the sand, it becomes more embarrassing to admit that you blew the chance we had to avoid this catastrophe, by refusing to acknowledge the existence of limits.

The same crowd peddling the “it could have worked if nuclear” story, is the crowd that refused to accept we had a problem to begin with. These are the same people who insist that fossil fuels would last forever and that we can just dump carbon into the atmosphere without consequences.

The fluxes of energy we could capture would always be limited however. Even if we had transitioned to renewable energy, our energy consumption would have had to go down: We don’t have any proper material to build all of the batteries necessary to store the electricity we capture at any significant scale. Everything we’re doing is subject to economies of scale. The first solar energy you add to your grid is pretty useful. By the time you want to add enough solar to have enough electricity in the middle of winter in Germany, you’re well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind, nor does it genuinely matter at this point in time. But to be a constant witness to human ignorance and delusions of omnipotence becomes frustrating after a while.


I
Oceanographers call them marine inundation events. We’ve been trained, with climate change predictions, to think that change will be gradual, but recent events like the drying up of rivers and massive forest fires have shown us that when certain break points are reached, climate changes radically.

This is also going to be true for floods or marine inundation events, and like rivers drying up, they’re going to start sooner than most people believe ....

..... Fixing this will require replacing almost all of the world’s elites and changing our political economy wholesale. Capitalism doesn’t work and neither does the current form of representative democracy.



............................ Does all this sound unspeakably grim? Most of the people who have ever lived were fine with it. They knew perfectly well that energy was scarce and had to be conserved, though most of them never phrased it in those terms. Keep in mind that Jesus and the Buddha taught their disciples, Plato and Confucius created their philosophies, Sophocles and Shakespeare wrote their plays, Murasaki Shikibu and Jane Austen penned their novels, and Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton revolutionized humanity’s knowledge of nature in societies that lived under such conditions.  They never dreamed that human beings would someday have the dubious privilege of wasting fantastic amounts of energy during a brief, self-terminating era of wretched excess.

We’re headed back to a world they would have recognized. Yes, I know a lot of people are still stuck on the failed fantasy of perpetual progress, and will insist at the top of their lungs that we’re on our way to the stars, no matter what. I trust, dear reader, that your mind isn’t held hostage by that delusion, and that you’re ready, willing, and able to get ready for the energy shortages we’re facing. If you are, you might want to get to work, because we don’t have much time before winter comes.



Dear Friends and Neighbors,

I’m sorry to say that I have some bad news for you: Civilization is collapsing. If you hadn’t realized that already, I imagine that reading this summary will come as something of a shock. If you’ve already started putting together the pieces for yourself, then this might cover some familiar territory. In any case, the purpose of this overview is to describe in simple and straightforward terms why so many reputable people have become convinced that civilization is heading for a disaster of epic proportions.....


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


Authorities Afraid of Criminal Liability for Vaccination?


this post by Meryl Nass has come highly recommended, by Capuzzo, Tessa, and Lyons-Weiler, among others:
Watch out. There is nothing good about them, and we should be worried about why they are being used







..... How could two different groups of scientists studying the same question arrive at such different contradictory answers!

Is someone committing scientific fraud here? Is one of the two teams incompetent? What’s going on here? What did the Abu-Raddad group do different, that prevented them from finding harmful immune imprinting? Hint: Four words.



.......... People in Bumfucknowhere Scotland are getting infected at higher rates, than people living in London.

All of this has less to do with SARS-COV-2 being a special virus and more to do with Homo Sapiens Sapiens having committed a very strange experiment. If SARS-COV-2 was intrinsically very nasty, you would be hearing about horror stories in Africa right now. The only horror stories you hear right now, are of unexplained excess mortality in the West, a massive jump in disability claims, a jump in people with memory problems and strange secondary pandemics of other viruses.

....... It wasn’t hard to see this coming. My posts on this topic are meant less to dissuade people from getting these shots, but more to simply document that it’s not very hard to see the mistake, that the evidence was continually flowing in, as they continued with their insanity. I don’t want them to get away with a “nobody could have seen this coming” argument.

If I can see it, they should have been able to see it. Most people who avoided these shots didn’t see it coming. The vast majority simply lucked out because they had a healthy degree of skepticism. If you have these new shots and they’re continually paused and then restarted because people drop dead, a sane person would be skeptical.

It really just requires being able to draw from different streams of knowledge and skeptically interpreting evidence yourself. But those are not traits modern society favors. ....



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:



Anecdotal Fare:

What is Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, you ask?



COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

Pfizer, FDA, CDC Hid Proven Harms to Male Sperm Quality, Testes Function, from mRNA Vaccine Ingredients




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War-Fare:


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Other GeoPolitical Fare:

The international system is going through a deep crisis and the group is poised to achieve greater relevance

Over 20 years after it began as an attempt at cooperation between five-Russian led post-Soviet states and an emerging China, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has become a major global institution, representing close to half of the world’s population. 

From September 15-16, Samarkand, one of the ancient centers of human civilization, will host the annual summit of the group. 


A bad argument for invading the Solomon Islands reflects the inherent conflict between America’s dominance and its purported liberal values.

There is no shortage of bad ideas circulating in U.S. foreign policy discourse. On occasion, however, a particularly poor argument can be helpful insofar as it reveals something noteworthy about the assumptions and ideology that produced it.

With an article in The National Interest entitled “Don’t Rule Out Intervention in the Solomon Islands,” Julian Spencer-Churchill provides such an example. The piece — which makes the case that Australia and the United States ought to consider military intervention to topple the government of the Solomon Islands in the wake of the small nation’s adoption of a security pact with China — presents an inartful mix of threat inflation, outright factual error, and regurgitations of basic international relations theory, and is not particularly worth engaging with in and of itself.

Yet Spencer-Churchill’s argument is useful in that it draws out some important contradictions in the strategy of liberal hegemony that drives U.S. foreign policy, and the “rules-based international order” it supposedly upholds.

The piece begins with a brief recitation of the origins and importance of self-determination and state sovereignty to the international system. This is immediately followed by a claim on behalf of the “coalition of democracies” to a right to violate these principles more or less at will.....



Orwellian Fare:

wow, in the WSJ of all places:

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They are Norman Rockwellians, or Eisenhowerites. They regard themselves, not without reason, as the last sane Americans. You might think of them as American masculinity in exile; like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, living in the forest has made their manners rough.

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent.

America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be. Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think.



I recently spent a few weeks producing print collections of my lengthy American Pravda series, deciding to finally make the articles available in hard copy.

The first volume was entitled Encountering American Pravda and contained my earliest pieces. Running a slender 150 pages, it can easily be read in just a day or two, and is ideally suited for introducing newcomers to the controversial material. Thus, it serves as a wading-pool, preparing readers for the deeper waters and far more explosive contents in the rest of the series, which together constitute a historical counter-narrative to the events of the last one hundred years. ....



Ron Unz has self-published in book form his articles from his website. As the articles are available in digital form and as Unz has shown his commitment to the digital revolution by digitalizing US intellectual journals and magazines prior to the digital age, an extraordinary gift to historical research, his reason for reverting to print is unclear. My guess is that he understands the vulnerability of digital information and the ease with which it can be burnt. Just think of all the takedowns of information by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other digital forums. The digital revolution has made the Memory Hole a ubiquitous and easy to use way to erase disapproved information.

I have six volumes of Unz’s articles: Jews, Nazis, and Israel; Conspiracy Theories; Understanding World War II; Encountering American Pravda; AIDS and Public Health Issues; Our Covid-19 Catastrophe. I have read most, if not all of Unz’s articles, have reposted some on my website and cited others in my writings. Individually Unz’s articles rescue you from The Matrix a piece at a time. But together organized by topic they immediately free your mind from all of the false official narratives we have been fed all our lives. Reading the entire picture together is like Redemption.

I have been reading Jews, Nazis, and Israel and Conspiracy Theories. They contain too much startling information for a book review to handle. Unz is a voracious reader. When he comes across something that does not fit the established narrative, he researches it to determine its validity. What you get from Unz is a test of official narratives versus their challengers, and official narratives seldom come off well.

I once wrote that Unz was the bravest person I know. He is not afraid of controversy or intimidated by the Israel Lobby or voices of establishment authorities. He wants to know. He finds out and shares with readers.

........................ It is Unz’s position on the two most contentious issues (Unz ascribes responsibility for both JFK's assassination and for 9/11 to Israel) that I find most vulnerable. The rest of the volume is one revelation after another, the final one being “Giants Silenced by Pygmies.” In this long article Unz documents America’s persecution of the best journalists, historians, and courageous whistleblowers for the crime of telling the truth. It is a frightening story as it shows the extreme lengths to which those served by false narratives will go in order to protect their political, financial, and ideological agendas. Arriving at truth is extremely difficult and growing more so. We must be thankful to Ron Unz for the truths he has revealed.


Quinn: "Say Nothing" Phase of This Fourth Turning

It has become clear to me, since the installation of dementia patient Biden as the illegitimate figurehead president by his globalist Deep State handlers, their agenda is to tear down our modern civilization and replace it with a totalitarian techno-gulag where you will be electronically monitored, disarmed, own nothing, be judged by social credit score, live in fear, and be happy – or else.

I’ve been pondering in which direction this Fourth Turning will flow, while observing the words and actions of our pedophile president and the other World Economic Forum puppets like Trudeau, Macron, and a myriad of other EU lackeys. I intellectually understand all Fourth Turnings reach their climax after immense bloodshed, climactic battles which could have gone either way, and in some cases saw citizens slaughtering fellow citizens. But I have tried to avoid thinking about the reality of what is likely to happen over the next five to ten years, as this Crisis turns from rhetoric and debate to violence and death. Keyboard warriors will yield to real warriors. ...............

.... I know the degradation of the intellectual, moral, and critical thinking skills of the American populace due to decades in government indoctrination centers known as public schools along with relentless propaganda and misinformation spewed from our boob tubes and now “smart” phones has reached critical mass, with little hope for a reversal until a full-out societal collapse. Well, that is where we are headed, because that is the course set in motion by those we trusted to lead this country. What ails this country, and the world is too much debt, too much corruption, too much materialism, too many lies, too much propaganda, too much delusion, too much stupidity, too much evil, and absolutely no solutions put forth which are capable of saving us from the course we chose decades ago.



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


You’re not jaded; everything really is just as phony and vapid as it looks.

I say this because if you are reading this it’s likely the result of a personal quest for truth which has led to a gradual peeling away of the lies our society is made of. Your eyes probably found this text because you’re the sort of person who’s been trying to make sense of the world in a sea of propaganda and deception, which often results in a growing disgust not just with the power structures which oppress and tyrannize humanity, but with our entire civilization.

This experience is very common for people like yourself, and it’s very common because it arises from a clear perception of reality. From the very beginning human civilization has been built around serving the interests of the powerful, from religion to philosophy to the arts to law. As the world has gotten smaller and it’s become possible to artificially manufacture culture with mass-distributed media, this has only become more the case.

That’s why the more you learn about the world, the more fake and stupid our civilization looks. It’s because it is fake and stupid. Our news, our entertainment, our jobs, our legal systems, our political systems, our education systems, our financial, monetary, economic and commercial systems; the way our entire civilization is structured and organized has nothing to do with what’s true and good and everything to do with keeping human organisms compliantly turning the gears of capitalism and empire. ....

...... This is what Terence McKenna was talking about when he said “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.” And it’s what Jiddu Krishnamurti was pointing at when he said “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” A lucid perception of reality today will necessarily be accompanied by the ever-present smell of bullshit. .....


********************* It’s Not Okay For Grown Adults To Say The Ukraine Invasion Was “Unprovoked”

On a recent interview with the Useful Idiots podcast, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word “unprovoked” every time anyone mentions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it. ......

...... This is to say nothing of the US empire actively fomenting a violent uprising in 2014 which ousted Kyiv’s sitting government and fractured the nation between its more Moscow-loyal populations to the east and the more US/EU-friendly parts of the country. This led to the annexation of Crimea (overwhelmingly supported by the people who live there) and eight years of brutal warfare against Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas. Ukrainian attacks on those separatists are known to have increased exponentially in the days leading up to the invasion, and it has been argued that this is what provoked Putin’s final decision to commit to invading (which was a last-minute decision according to US intelligence).

The US power alliance could very easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost concessions like enshrining Ukrainian neutrality, rolling back its war machinery from Russia’s borders and sincerely pursuing detente with Moscow instead of shredding treaties and ramping up cold war escalations. Hell, it could likely have prevented this war just by protecting President Zelensky from the anti-Moscow far right nationalists who were openly threatening to lynch him if he began honoring the Minsk agreements and pursuing peace with Russia, as he was originally elected to do. ......

......... It’s not okay to be a grown adult in September of 2022 and still say the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. You’ve got a brain between your ears and an entire internet of information at your fingertips. Use them.



The Ukraine Proxy War Has Been A Propaganda Win For Interventionists

Neocon erotica publication The Atlantic has a new article out titled “The Rise of the Liberal Hawks” which is infuriating as much for its sycophantic empire apologia as it is for the fact that much it is entirely correct.

“Progressives typically see war as inherently murderous and dehumanizing — sapping progress, curtailing free expression, and channeling resources into the ‘military-industrial complex,’” sneers the article’s author, Dominic Tierney. “The left led the opposition to the Vietnam War and the Iraq War and condemned American war crimes from the My Lai massacre to Abu Ghraib. Historically, progressive critics have charged the military with a litany of sins, including discrimination against LGBTQ soldiers and a reliance on recruiting in poor communities.”

“Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” writes Tierney. “No foreign conflict since the Spanish Civil War has so captured the imagination of the left.” .......



Rigger-ous (Culture Wars; Identity Politics; etc) Fare:


What’s the difference between education and indoctrination?

We have been arguing about this question since the emergence of public schooling in the mid-nineteenth century. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that charges of indoctrination are essential ammunition in the culture wars currently rending our public schools. “We need to be educating people, not trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.” So said Ron DeSantis when the Florida Board of Education voted to ban critical race theory from K-12 schools last year. In a separate statement, touting the benefits of the Stop WOKE Act, DeSantis declared, “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other.”

The late educational philosopher Kieran Egan observed that we use the term indoctrination whenever children are taught ideas, beliefs and values that conflict with our own. 

............ Kieran Egan, the educational philosopher I mentioned before, said that what distinguishes education from indoctrination is “openness of inquiry.” So here is the diagnostic test: when teachers present ideas, beliefs and values as unquestionable truths, that’s a good sign indoctrination is at work.

......... Horace Mann got it dreadfully wrong that public schools could somehow avoid getting caught up in partisan politics. In our pluralistic, democratic society, there will always be fierce battles about public schools, from how they are funded to what they teach. But I think Mann was onto something when he stressed that teachers should not act as proselytizers. Students, and here I’m paraphrasing former ACLU president Nadine Strossen, should be encouraged not just to answer every question but also to question every answer. Public education, at its best, gives students the foundation of knowledge and skills to make up their own minds.



..... We hear a lot about how TERFs and other gender-critical folk are “erasing” trans people. I think the GIMPs (Gender Ideology Madness Promoters) are doing a fine job of that all by themselves.

......... Cistrans people are caught in the middle of this hellish mess. They’re being used as pawns in some GIMPy game on the one hand, and are facing some very serious backlash from ‘normal’ people on the other. A backlash almost entirely caused by the obsessive focus on the issue.

... By including all the GIMPy weird shit under the ‘trans’ umbrella what do you think the reaction of your ‘average’ person is going to be? They’re going to see things like demigirlflux and think the whole lot is ridiculous - and cistrans people will get lumped in with that dismissal.

I have no idea what these ‘progressive’ lunatics think they’re doing, but things aren’t getting better at all with their endless label-generation and sanctimonious drivel. They’re just creating a seething, roiling mass of resentment everywhere - and my fear is this is going to explode.



As is par for the course these days, deviation by even the merest scintilla from the official progressive doctrine is enough to bring forth the ravening hordes screaming for your cancellation (and worse) and for you to be labelled as a monster. Look no further than J.K. Rowling who is one of the least monster-like so-called ‘monsters’ one could imagine. Her crime was to argue with a great deal of compassion and without any hate that biology might, just might, maybe, perhaps, every so often, once in a blue moon, and possibly in a decade of Sundays, be the slightest, teensy-weensiest bit relevant to being a woman.

For this appalling crime she has been the subject of a truly absurd, truly surreal, and truly chilling level of condemnation and abuse. ....


Spitfire Audio has released a statement after its co-founder Christian Henson shared the "wrong opinions" on gender ID--saying they must "do better".

We truly live in tricky times. Many of us woke up one day, went to work and found ourselves in a situation where we are ‘asked’ to affirm things we know not to be true should we wish to remain in employment.

There is a list of pre-approved opinions on the issue of gender and any deviation from scripture it is to be met with the total destruction of one’s reputation and livelihood. That is the deal we are being offered by those whose ideology was born 5 minutes ago and should rightly be considered a form of gender flat-earthism. 

It’s a remarkable feat of gender activism to have convinced people that any disagreement on this score is “punching down” whilst also commanding the full punitive power of academia, media, celebrity, law, employers and practically any other institution you care to name.

Put simply, this debate has become far too risky for sensible people should they also desire to continue paying their bills. So it’s not surprising that many would simply check out of this argument altogether. I’ve lost count of the number of private messages I receive that begin with a variation of “I can’t say this publicly because of my job..” This chilling effect on free speech wouldn’t be so worrying were the stakes not so astronomically high.

This is one of the reasons having someone like JK Rowling speak up on this issue—in the compassionate and measured way that she does—is utterly invaluable. Anyone that thinks this has been a doddle for Rowling is surely mistaken however. The endless death threats, character assassinations and defamation would surely take its toll on anyone. ...


The Healthcare Wars, Part 1

I am currently reading Dr. James Lyons-Weiler's book The Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism. I could have finished it, but there are a lot of citations, and I'd rather go down this road slowly so that I can absorb more of it more completely.

In the meantime, Toby Rogers is exploring the notion that part of the craziness of American politics is that large portions of both partisan pools are vaccine-injured: ... I think he is onto something ... But the topic is important, and as I delved deeper, I began to believe that the explosive increase in the number of trans people is likely related to the explosive increase in the number of autistic people. Indeed, those groups overlap pretty heavily.

... A few hours ago I stumbled on this video by Zach Bush:



... Here is where I am: I suspect that a combination of environment and pharmaceutical poisons are crushing America, and perhaps the West as a whole. ...

Obviously, as RTE readers surely know, I'm far from naive about horrors of the world, but I had not previously understood the role of poisons to any depth. I see financial corruption quite easily. I've been spotting fake scientific research for 27 years. I'm very familiar with propaganda and psychological manipulation, also. But now I'm beginning to see all that form one big picture along with the ways that various poisons are altering, crippling, or destroying people.



Vids:




Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Mistakes that keep on giving

We’ve all heard of fraud in medical research, but we don’t hear as much about mistakes that quietly get passed on to thousands or tens of thousands of papers. They’re definitely out there, and it’s quite possible that they’re more prevalent, and costly, than fraud.

What’s sad is that they’re often preventable. What’s even sadder is that scientists are often incentivized to keep these mistakes buried.

This article is about a particularly costly and tenacious mistake that has been polluting the scientific literature for decades, with no signs of going away anytime soon. ...........................

...................................................... The story of false cell lines makes it all the more ridiculous to say things like, “The science is settled.” The reality of science is much messier.



Two weeks ago I wrote about scientific fraud. Last week, Joomi Kim published an excellent, excruciating piece [above] on the failure to correct error in science—even error that is known, has been publicized, and which renders the results of new science—some of which human health and safety are relying on—suspect at best, obviously flawed at worst. I highly recommend this piece.

These two pieces—mine on outright fraud, Dr. Kim’s on more subtle pollution of the scientific literature—reflect problems in the state of science that far predate Covid. But then Covid arrived, and revealed all sorts of new issues.

The last two and a half years have been surprising, to put it mildly. A pandemic. Authoritarianism in places that we thought were fonts of democracy. Mass formation. People betraying their most cherished and foundational beliefs, while proudly proclaiming that they were, are, and shall forever remain the good guys. Others looking away ashamed, if they admit it to themselves, ashamed as the realization dawns on them that yes, they’ve been had, but worse than that? When they were at their most confused and compliant, they threw the courageous under the bus.

One thing that has become all too clear since early 2020 is that most smart and educated people have no experience with or understanding of science. By this I don’t mean that they don’t understand the Krebs cycle or thermodynamics, or that they have never run a PCR. The vast majority of us don’t, and haven’t. But grokking science sufficiently that you understand how claims are made and assessed, and can see where the loopholes exist, should be mandatory for anyone who thinks that they are smart and educated. And yet, while nobody at a fancy cocktail party would admit to being illiterate, people will proudly proclaim their innumeracy. There’s no comparable word for it, but the fancy party goers similarly reveal their failure to understand science when they make pronouncements like “Follow the Science!”

Here is a slight caricature of thinking I have heard in the past two years from people, intellectuals mostly, who believe themselves to be critical thinkers who bring a skeptical eye to all that they assess:
Intellectual: I believe in the importance and value of the category of things called X.
Entity: Hey! Here’s a new product that we like to call X. Try it. You’d be a fool not to.
Intellectual: That’s the one for me! Anyone who doesn’t accept this newly branded X is clearly anti-X in all of its forms. My work here is done.
Entity: So too is mine.
Specifically and most frequently, I have heard this formulation trotted out where X = Covid vaccines. It seems that as soon as this new product was called a vaccine, that’s all it took for a whole suite of intellectuals to say “welllll it’s quite obvious really, if you don’t take this vaccine, then you’re an anti-vaxxer.” Is it really so difficult to see that slapping a label on something doesn’t inherently make the label true? It’s just as absurd and anti-scientific to say “trust all treatments labeled X” as it is to insist that we “believe all women” (or black people or Latvians or democrats or whatever).

An intellectual who follows the authorities in all things scientific and medical may be unlikely to put up a yard sign that proclaims “In this house, we believe that science is real,” but only for snobbish reasons. They just know, in their heart of hearts, that science is real, and that they don’t need to put up a sign to prove it. And yet, in the houses of these intellectuals, they may think that they believe that science is real, but there’s nothing in their assessment of sciencish authorities that suggests that they have any idea what it means to think scientifically. .......

...... Where diversity does matter is in which questions get asked. Different people, with different life histories and demographics and interests, will ask different questions. Science generally doesn’t answer the questions that don’t get asked. Often, the most important questions have been missed at first, for they were thought obvious, or ignorant, or uninteresting.

In their 1938 book, The Evolution of Physics, co-authors Albert Einstein and Lรฉopold Infeld wrote:
The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.


Satirical Fare:








apparently, I don't know where I am living, but it ain't the present:


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