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Monday, September 12, 2022

2022-09-12

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


Economic and Market Fare:


........ There are powerful inflationary biases percolating throughout the economy - unlike anything experienced in decades. Importantly, securities markets no longer completely dominate and dictate system financial conditions. Lending and bank Credit have become powerful drivers of Credit growth, along with ongoing deficit spending and the expansionary GSEs.

While it’s mum’s the word when it comes to Credit growth, Fed officials undoubtedly know the numbers. They must also know that inflation will not be moving back to their 2% target until they orchestrate a marked Credit slowdown (with myriad negative consequences). They’ve been forced to abandon the notion that tinkering with market financial conditions would do the trick. Now, it’s press ahead with a major tightening cycle until something works. And between the Z.1 and recent speculative market dynamics, there is certainly no reason to backtrack from the “they’ll hike until something breaks” thesis. .......



While the Federal Reserve is focused on fighting inflation and willing to cause “some pain” to achieve victory, they hope to do so without evoking a recession. Such may be a challenge for two primary reasons:
  1. The Fed remains focused on lagging economic data, such as employment, which are highly subject to future revisions, and;
  2. Changes to monetary policy do not show up in the economy until roughly 9-12 months in the future.
The second challenge is the most important.


  • Papers at noted Washington conference outline risks ahead
  • Fed-driven dollar rise seen posing trouble for rest of world

Let's tune into some interesting statements by former Fed Vice Chair Richard Clarida and his ducking of questions on the Fed's role in this mess.


Who loses in the battle against inflation.

.................. This is the sense in which the Federal Reserve — or the myth of the Federal Reserve — is a scam. We’ve been sold this lie that we can give this one agency responsibility for managing the economy, inoculated from politics, and then it’ll work out best for everyone.

Managing the economy requires a lot of different agencies that are contributing, and it would work a lot better if you were approaching solving problems from many different angles.

If you weren’t already indoctrinated on this stuff, and most people reading this probably haven’t thought much about the Federal Reserve at all, you wouldn’t necessarily think, “Oh, yeah, one agency moving interest rates up and down, that’s the way to manage the entire complex 21st-century economy, rather than using many tools and many different specialties to do that job.” It’s kind of a crazy idea if you haven’t been absorbed in a world that takes that for granted.



People tend to hear what they want to hear and believe what they need to believe. In no place is this more true than on Wall Street. The Fed has made abundantly clear that it will tighten monetary policy until inflation is virtually vanquished. And yet, those who have no choice but to be nearly fully invested at all times have completely ignored this fact and were left trying to convince the investing public not to believe their own ears. That was a huge mistake going into the start of this year, and that is even more true today. The entire FOMC is promising that rates are going to increase to about 4% by early 2023, but the cheerleaders still say they are bluffing.

What is closer to the truth is that the Fed will continue to raise interest rates towards its 4% target unless the credit and labor markets collapse. The entire cohort of money printers and market manipulators have been thoroughly embarrassed by their transitory inflation prediction. And now, they care much more about the unaffordability of rents than they do about making sure corporate profits are better than expected. If they were to flip-flop again now, the little credibility they have left would be gone. Let me be clear, Powell will indeed eventually pivot, but it will be because the economy and equity markets have collapsed, not because stock prices are falling.

Investors should not take much solace in the idea that inflation has peaked because it always does during recessions.

The narrative from Wall Street is that inflation has peaked, the bear market is over, and a new bull market has begun. This sophomoric and specious conclusion completely ignores the other half of the equation, which is, the falling rate of change in CPI is a direct consequence of a faltering economy.

Hence, there is indeed a realistic hope that the Fed can stop hiking rates by 75 bps increments and can dial it back to 50 and 25 bases point hikes for the remainder of this tightening cycle. Powell may also stop raising the Fed Funds Rate altogether by early next year. However, it will come at the expense of a spiking unemployment rate, a crashing housing market, clogged credit markets, plunging earnings growth, and equity markets that are in complete chaos. 

The bad news for the perm-bulls doesn’t end there. Powell will be very reluctant to lower interest rates after the 4% target rate has been achieved, regardless of the damage done to the economy. This is because the memory of a dangerous and embarrassing battle with intractably-high inflation has been seared into the frontal lobes of all the members of the FOMC. ...



















...... To remind readers of this coming phase shift, we most recently warned in June that "at some point Fed will concede it has no control over supply. That's when we will start getting leaks of raising the inflation target"...

...... But what so few seem to recall is that the Fed is "hiking to spark a recession", or as CNBC's Steve Liesman put it, there is no such thing as "immaculate rate hikes" meaning that rate hikes have dire tradeoffs in other sectors of the economy. In other words, if the Fed's intention is to spark a recession, it will spark a recession... leading to millions of Americans losing their jobs

.... However, the higher rates rise, the closer we get to that inevitable moment when the BLS - unable to kick the can any longer - admits what has been obvious to so many for months: the US is facing a labor crisis of epic proportions with millions and millions of mass layoffs. And for those to whom it is not yet obvious, we urge to read a WSJ op-ed published by none other than Jason Furman


Deprcon index for the Eurozone falls to 1


deLong: Our Ancestors Thought We'd Build an Economic Paradise. Instead We Got 2022


Real-estate firms have written at least $300 billion in mortgage guarantees on uncompleted homes that they presold



Quotes of the Week:

not the experts I would normally be quoting, but I happen to agree with these yahoos on this:
1-Musk: A major Fed rate hike risks deflation
2-Wood: Deflation in the pipeline, heading for the PPI, CPI, PCE Deflator: from post-COVID price peaks, lumber -60%, copper -35%, oil -35%, iron ore -60%, DRAM -46%, corn -17%, Baltic freight rates -79%, gold -17%, and silver -39%.


Pettis (tweet 6 of 6 in a thread): This isn't bad luck or unfortunate timing. It is a systemic process exactly as Hyman Minsky described. The very conditions of a rising market create the behavior that ultimately undermines stability.


Tchir: Enjoy the easing of inflation for now. But as I mentioned in a report earlier this summer, a pendulum swinging back, will be at the bottom at one point, but it won’t stop there



Singer: They are lying to you. We are not only in a recession we could be headed for a full on depression



Charts: 
1:

...



Bubble Fare:

Enter Lehman Week.

..... When this year started, it looked like China would be the locus of risk for 2022. Their signature COVID ZERO policy was achieving its goal of collapsing growth down to ZERO percent. Meanwhile, China Evergrande - the world's most leveraged property developer was heading for bankruptcy. Subsequently, the entire Chinese real estate market has imploded, and Hong Kong stocks are trading at the lowest level since 2015. 

That risk was soon eclipsed by the Russian war in Ukraine which sent commodity prices sky-rocketing. Europe threatened to cutoff all energy imports from Russia, but they had no way of following through without causing self-imposed depression. All of that sanction posturing led Russia to pre-emptively cut off natural gas to Europe, THIS week. In the meantime, the ECB  has embarked on the most brutal tightening campaign in Euro history, culminating in a super sized .75% rate hike also THIS week. 

Not to be outdone by competitive idiocy, the U.S. entered 2022 as the tallest midget in the circus, but then the CPI skyrocketed and the Fed was forced to abruptly taper QE and begin rate hiking. In June they began Quantitative Tightening and the most aggressive rate hiking regimen since Volcker 1980. Subsequently, stocks entered bear market, GDP crashed, the housing market rolled over, and consumer sentiment hit an all time low.

Ironically, Japan has been the outlier country in 2022. As of this week they have the strongest MAJOR economy in the entire world, in Q2 registering a by comparison blistering 3.5% REAL growth rate. In addition, Japan's inflation rate is also the LOWEST of the major economies. Which is why it makes no sense that the Japanese Yen is trading at the lowest level since 1998. Except in the context of interest rate policy divergence from the U.S. Which is what global hot money traders are betting will continue forever.

We are one global overnight RISK OFF event away from hot money explosion circa 1998 LTCM.  

All of which gets us to this coming week - the anniversary of Lehman collapse in 2008. Then as now, policy-makers are totally concerned with inflation. Also, then as now there is RAMPANT recession denial. However, this time around the falling dominoes that are being ignored are not U.S. banks, they are entire countries.

Right on time, Michael Burry of 2008 Big Short fame was out this week with another warning of bubble collapse. He ticked off SPACs, Cryptos, Meme stocks and Ark ETFs as evidence of collapsing bubbles. However, those risks are CHUMP change compared to the real risks listed above. When this gong show explodes, no one is going to be talking about Gamestop. Which is why most U.S. investors don't see this coming - because even the bears are totally focused on U.S. markets. Whereas the greatest risks are taking place overseas.

Lehman week is bracketed by the two big central bank meetings - ECB and the Fed. This week, the ECB raised rates by .75% which means that AT MINIMUM this month will see 5x the monetary firepower that imploded markets in 2015 and 2018. Not including all of the other smaller central banks. AND not including U.S. QT ramping up to $95 billion this month.



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


As the world warms, these Earth systems are changing. Could further warming make them spiral out of control?


Millions Of Electric Car Batteries Retiring By 2030, Are We Ready To Deal With What Could Be Ticking Time Bombs?

The evolving landscape of lithium batteries is creating both contradictions and infrastructure hurdles that, according to some, need to be addressed sooner rather than later. A critical component of this is waste management. ...



Geopolitical Fare:



Streeck: Pipe Dreams

........... Schäuble’s proposal for a reorganization of Europe can only be understood as a product of despair: a last attempt to keep alive something like a minimally credible prospect of European strategic independence.

....... The unprecedented American military build-up over the past thirty years – including the arming of Ukraine after 2014, among the most impressive preparations for war in recent history – and the unilateral cancellation of all arms-control treaties from the Cold War era, must never be mentioned in this context. In fact, anything that refers to the prehistory of the invasion of Ukraine is anathema, especially the Minsk negotiations and the winter months of 2021



Sci Fare:




Other Fare:








Pics of the Week:

California fire creating its own weather as dozens of blazes burn across U.S.


Worst air quality on Earth recorded in parts of B.C. as wildfires burn


Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:


...... But Hillary’s denial of what was found on her server exposes something far more serious than a simply false claim. It reflects establishment figures’ sense of license that they can literally rewrite history with little fear of contradiction by the media. ....




Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

Famine, floods and food waste


Bates: Reversing the Curve

..... Bill McKibben wrote: “And there’s no doubt that the people of Pakistan are not to blame for their tragedy: on average each Pakistani is responsible for about one fifteenth as much carbon dioxide as each American….

I beg to differ. At UN climate meetings, Sherry Rehman is just the latest spokesperson for Pakistan’s God-given right to attain the affluence of Sweden before agreeing to strong climate measures. That is why Pakistan is building eight more large coal-fired power stations, four of them in Sindh Province where rainfall is now five times the past century’s average. Those coal plants are 20% more expensive to build and operate than solar photovoltaic farms. ...

...... Earth has been several degrees warmer, but it took tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to make that transition. We are accomplishing it now, as we all watch, in under a century. That is less surprising when we consider that following Colonel Drake’s discovery of “coal oil” mid-19th century, we converted 500 million years of sunlight landing on Earth’s surface in the short space of 150 years — releasing more energy and smoke than all the volcanoes in human history.

Tipping Elements
Climate scientists have long emphasized the importance of climate tipping points like thawing permafrost, ocean methane, ice sheet disintegration, deforestation of the Amazon, and changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation. Collectively, climate tipping points increase social costs and global economic risks. Tipping point interactions have not been well examined so far. .......

Standing on the bottom third of an exponential curve and looking back, one sees a gentle slope disappearing off below the horizon. Turning around and looking the other way — into the future — one sees a gradually rising foothill backed by a sheer mountain wall. The summit is lost somewhere in the clouds.

In the first two decades of this century, we moved up to perhaps the halfway point where the curve has begun more noticeably to ascend. The doubling rate is the same, but each doubling is more than all the warming and disruption that came before. So far, the 21st century has had more chaotic weather effects than the entire 20th century. The next decade or two will likely more than double that, and double again in the decades following, with each doubling coming at closer intervals to the preceding. At what point will we collectively grasp the significance of the exponential function? ....



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



.. I once again wish to explain something important to you: You’re the descendant of those primates that survived historical outbreaks of coronaviruses that decimated our ancestors. The fingerprints of these previous outbreaks can be found in our primate genomes, whether you like it or not (and no, I know you don’t like it).

I’ve probably explained this a few times by now, but coronaviruses have caused large death tolls among human beings before. We know this, because we can see the genetic evidence of natural selection among East Asian populations today. People would have had to be getting killed, handicapped or sterilized by these viruses for generations, to explain the kind of impact we see on their genome.

But it’s always worse than you think. Take a look at this: ......

...... What this means is that we have constantly been suffering through very deadly coronavirus pandemics, throughout human evolution. These viruses would have been killing, disabling and/or sterilizing numerous people, even though 99% of humans born back then would have died before reaching what we now consider to be old age.

If you look around, you’ll notice the people who died from SARS-COV-2 are mostly elderly people and people who suffer from various pre-existing conditions. So how do we reconcile this, with these coronaviruses decimating the human population in the past? There are different explanations to consider:
  • We lucked out with SARS-COV-2, which happened to be a rare nothingburger variant.
  • SARS-COV-2 has just shown a fraction of its evolutionary potential.
  • SARS-COV-2 is causing silent damage to our bodies, that ends up decimating us in the future.
And if you have been reading my articles for a while now, you’ll realize that I’m leaning towards the latter two explanations. Evidence for that is not hard to find:
  • Increased risk of dementia after infection.
  • Decline in T-cell function after infection.
  • All sorts of other pathogens are now jumping into our species (see: Monkeypox).
  • Gradual increase in ACE2 affinity in newer variants.
And so now we live another episode where a “bomb burst”. ....


Declaration Of International Medical Crisis Over ‘Covid-19 Vaccines’

We, the medical doctors and scientists from all over the world, declare that there is an international medical crisis due to the diseases and deaths co-related to the administration of products known as ‘COVID-19 vaccines’. We are currently witnessing an excess in mortality in those countries where the majority of the population has received the so-called ‘COVID-19 vaccines’. To date, this excess mortality has neither been sufficiently investigated nor studied by national and international health institutions. The large number of sudden deaths in previously healthy young people who were inoculated with these ‘vaccines’, is particularly worrying, as is the high incidence of miscarriages and perinatal deaths which have not been investigated.


Top Scientists Publish Paradigm-Shifting Study About COVID-19 Vaccines.

Reported by The Epoch Times, a 50-page study, co-authored by:
  • Dr. Stefan Baral, an epidemiology professor at Johns Hopkins University;
  • surgeon Martin Adel Makary, M.D., a professor at Johns Hopkins University;
  • Dr. Vinayak Prasad, a haematologist-oncologist professor at UCSF;
  • Salmaan Keshavjee, M.D., Ph.D., current Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Global Health Delivery, and professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School;

concludes that mandates for COVID-19 boosters for young people may cause up to 98 actual serious adverse events for each COVID-19 infection-related hospitalization theoretically prevented.

The authors provide five reasons why the “vaccines” are unethical and should not be mandated:

1) Lack of policymaking transparency. The scientists pointed out that no formal and scientifically rigorous risk-benefit analysis of whether boosters are helpful in preventing severe infections and hospitalizations exists for young adults.

2) Expected harm. A look at the currently available data shows that mandates will result in what the authors call a “net expected harm” to young people. This expected harm will exceed the potential benefit from the boosters.

3) Lack of efficacy. The vaccines have not effectively prevented transmission of COVID-19. Given how poorly they work—the authors call this “modest and transient effectiveness” — the expected harms caused by the boosters likely outweigh any benefits to public health.

4) No recourse for vaccine-injured young adults. Forcing vaccination as a prerequisite to attend college is especially problematic because young people injured by these vaccines will likely not be able to receive compensation for these injuries.

5) Harm to society. Mandates, the authors insisted, ostracize unvaccinated young adults, excluding them from education and university employment opportunities. Coerced vaccination entails “major infringements to free choice of occupation and freedom of association,” the scientists wrote, especially when “mandates are not supported by compelling public health justification.”



Report from Analysis of Life Insurance Data



............... Now…I want you to sit back and think about what this actually means on the Grander Scale of things…
  1. Following each subsequent jab, there are additional deaths - meaning NO PROTECTION;
  2. People who survived COVID prior to a 3rd, 4th and 5th Jab are dying from COVID following a 3rd, 4th and 5th Jab;
  3. Each subsequent strain of COVID has lessened in severity; while
  4. Those with more jabs are outpacing not only the unvaccinated, but the ones who were smart enough to quit after 2; and then there is
  5. Your tax dollars are being used by the Government of Canada to Promote Vaccinations in Children, while you will be permanently suspended from Social Media Platforms for recognizing that Children were never at risk and that the more jabs you get, the more risk you are at from COVID:
..... Promoted Tweet means that the Government of Canada is paying for advertising for Big Pharma, because Big Pharma isn’t allowed to do their own promoting…the message?

COVID-19 vaccination will increase your child’s protection against severe illness…when no matter what age cohort we review, this is exactly 100% False - in that there has been more Hospitalizations, ICU admissions and Mortality with/from COVID since the jabs were first rolled out and with each subsequent jab.

How many more? .....



............................ I’m inclined to believe the embalmers, when they say they’re seeing strange stuff show up in people’s blood vessels. The most plausible explanation for the findings they are reporting is some form of systemic amyloidosis. In humans, 85% of diagnosed cases of systemic amyloidosis are caused by light chains from antibodies.

We have a reason to believe we engaged in an unprecedented experiment, that could lead the body to produce unusually large amounts of similar antibodies, all dependent on the same limited enzymes that could break them down for us, which would then suffer depletion. Never before have we given adult human beings three shots of a vaccine in one year, only for the virus it is supposed to protect people again to infect them after all.

If it wasn’t obvious yet, if this is the explanation for the observations, it’s bad news. Eighty percent of people with light chain amyloidosis are dead within ten years. You would need to kill off their B cells to stop the problem. If you somehow figured out how to give the majority of the adult Western population B cell depleting treatment, you would run into the next problem: Humans are now sitting ducks for various pathogens.

I have given you here what looks to me like the most plausible explanation: A buildup in blood vessels of light chains from antibodies produced in excessive amounts after vaccination and perhaps subsequent infections. In future posts we could take a look at what can be done to address it, but I first wish to state what I think the most plausible explanation would be. Perhaps there are things I’m missing that others could address.


Biomedical research methodology is being dumbed down, making it impossible for research scientists to render results that lead to knowledge and understanding.

The public can no longer assume that the biomedical and clinical research community is up to the task of ensuring that their research studies produce knowledge about reality because methodology is being dumbed down. Here’s the proof. .................

..... FOR THOSE WHO ARE INVOLVED IN BIOSTATISTICS AND EPIDEMIOLOGY, I ALSO OFFER THIS POWERFUL CITATION THAT SHOWS PRECISELY THE EFFECT OF IGNORING THE INTERACTION TERM THAT I HAVE BEEN WARNING ABOUT SINCE 2015 (HERE, FOR EXAMPLE, IS AN ARTICLE IN 2018). THE PROBLEM IS THAT THE BETA COEFFICIENT ESTIMATES BECOME BIASED IF THE INTERACTION IS SIGNIFICANT AND NOT STUDIED OR NOT REPORTED. THIS IS HOW YOU MAKE SOMETHING LIKE A VACCINE LOOK SAFE WHEN IT IS NOT.


That ‘social distancing’ arose from a school science project appears to be an elaborate cover story for the fact the concept was lifted directly from China’s lockdown measures during SARS in 2003.

In April 2020, while most of the world was in strict lockdown, the New York Times published The Untold Story of the Birth of Social Distancing, reassuring readers that this concept of “social distancing” had a scientific history.

Of course, this was nonsense. Western nations hadn’t merely implemented voluntary social distancing, they’d imposed lockdowns: Shutting businesses and community spaces with the force of law. These lockdowns were unprecedented in the western world and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan. They failed to meaningfully slow the spread of Covid and led to the deaths of tens of thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried.

........ After the Chinese Communist Party took power in China in 1949, this ancient concept of “lockdown” was effectively grandfathered into CCP policy. For example, one CCP document from the year 2000 contains very detailed instructions on the implementation of lockdown (封锁) in response to “an animal disease that seriously endangers human and animal health.” Another CCP document from 2002 recommends lockdown (封锁) in the case of avian influenza. The CCP also imposed lockdown measures in response to SARS in 2003.

.... This concept of lockdown has precursors in other ancient civilizations as well, including in Europe. Various versions of lockdown were recorded during the Great Plague of London in the 1660s, during various medieval plagues in Italy, throughout Europe during the Black Death in the 14th century, and in countless other instances as well.

The results in each case were, of course, absolutely awful .....

.......... Across many fields, the progress of human civilization can often be attributed to the mainstream acceptance of complex and often counterintuitive ideas, and nowhere was this more clear than in the fields of epidemiology and public health throughout the 20th century.

For centuries, scientists had observed the deleterious social, economic, and health effects of lockdowns and quarantines and wondered when and under what circumstances these measures were actually beneficial. This question came to especial prominence during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, after which a broad consensus formed that masks and lockdown measures had been counterproductive. .....

..... The truth is, even in our modern world, despite our formidable knowledge of so many subjects, our collective knowledge of viruses is nowhere near as sophisticated as is commonly believed. Perhaps in the 22nd century people will look back and laugh at our primitive understanding of virology. But for now, we simply don’t know why infections crop up even in long-isolated individuals. Herd immunity takes this knowledge deficit into account and has long been central to best public health practices based on what we do know.

But for whatever reason, owing to the CDC’s sudden passage of “Community-Wide Measures to Increase Social Distance” in January 2004 and Hatchett’s subsequent efforts, the medieval concept of lockdown (封锁) had now been re-imported into western pandemic planning as “social distancing.” These events soon triggered their very own reverse-Enlightenment, with teams of scientists, often physicists like Neil Ferguson, churning out model after model claiming to prove the effectiveness of mass quarantines and “social distancing,” spinning an illusion that the revival of this medieval policy represented some new scientific breakthrough. 99.9% of the population had no reason to know or think about any of this until 2020, when these measures were suddenly unleashed indiscriminately across the western world, often skipping the modern name of “social distancing” altogether and defaulting instead to the original Chinese name of “lockdown.”



CO-VIDs of the Week:


Lest we forget, Her Majesty was "fully vaccinated and had a booster shot"—or so we were told. Whether she was or not (could it be possible she really was?), her death SHOULD raise some questions


It's hard to feel much sympathy for "journalists" whose blind compliance with the "vaccination" drive is killing even them, along with all the others they have misled so disastrously—and unforgivably


Given all of the SADS Deaths, no?

... But with this being said, given the number of youthful people and professional athletes who’ve been keeling over in their sleep, with no prior health conditions, shouldn’t we soon start to see a surplus in transplantable organs?

It’s weird to think about…but given that the Number 1 Cause of death in Alberta was listed as “Unknown”…are we still able to even harvest organs from these or the other mysterious SADS victims for those in need?



Pushback Fare:

Written by a doctor. Everyone should read this. We are headed for a perfect storm with escalating health needs and a shortage of doctors because of how we treat them.

Dear Steve,

You ask why doctors are silent. The electronic medical records (EMRs) are a ball and chain to physicians. We are tracked through them. When I wrote a prescription for Ivermectin for a patient, with informed consent (she was vaccinated), I received 5 letters threatening my medical license, my hospital privileges, and my insurance contracts. I would not have received 5 letters if I killed someone in negligence or malpractice. If I have my license pulled, I will no longer be able to help my patients. .........

... I hope to retire in the next 1-3 years, decades before I had planned. I love what I do, but cannot take this toxic and broken system any longer. This is why so many have retired in the past couple years, and this trend will continue.


ACTION Requested - Americans, please sign petition by end of 9/12

If you appreciate my data analyses and lawsuits against agents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, please go to beyondthecon.com and sign the petition for a federal Grand Jury investigation of the FDA, CDC, NIH and other government agencies and actors. .....

.... Make no mistake - the only recourse citizens have, in any court system, when the government commits crimes against the citizens, is the right to peitition the government for redress of grievances, directly to the Grand Jury. US Attorneys have shown themselves to be an illegal gate-keeper of information flow between citizen petitioners and Grand Jury foremen. Citizens must claim their right to circumvent the gate-keepers and petition the Grand Jury foreman to appear before the Grand Jury.



COVID Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

The Never-ending Onslaught of Covid Booster Shots

When I think back to my childhood and all the injections I received as a kid, and then fast forward to my time served in the Army for 20 years, I can remember some of the shots I had prior to deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan involving some boosters that they told me were necessary, so of course I just stuck out my arm like a good boy or a good soldier and didn’t think much of it.

First, a quick flashback to the Pill Scene from original film “The Matrix”, from 1999: Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) offers Neo (Keanu Reeves) the choice of taking the Blue Pill or the Red Pill. If Neo took the blue pill, he could wake up in his bed and believe whatever he wanted to believe about the world he lived in, basically just living out his life going through the motions, being a good citizen, a hard worker, and always giving blind obedience to authority. But if he took the red pill, the scales would be lifted from his eyes and would come to know the truth that he was born into bondage, a slave to a system of tyranny and absolute control over human beings embedded inside a fake reality computer program called The Matrix. Out of sense of curiosity but also a leap of faith, of course Neo takes the Red Pill and he becomes a total bad-ass, and you know the rest of the story if you watched the movie and its sequels.

Sadly, so many people around the world want to continue taking the blue-pill, or are taking the blue-pill whether they even realize it or not. Sure, no government institutions or media outlets are perfect, but they must still be looking out for my well-being (they reckon to themselves), so I will keep doing what I’m told; I’m sure everything will work out just fine. Whether it is from a sense of pride, arrogance or stubborn ignorance, they continue to fall for a counterfeit, and thus bury their heads in the sand as time marches on.

Now, having been red-pilled for over ten years when it comes to the greed and corruption of Big Pharma, especially when it comes to the push to vaccinate the world in general, it seems this unbridled Covid booster campaign just keeps gaining speed. .....

Despite the narrative surrounding Rep Clyburn’s statement which continues to brainwash blue-pilled America, I had to a double-take and read again the part where the FDA is authorizing this new single dose bivalent coronavirus vaccines for use as a booster at least two months following primary or booster vaccination.  Are you kidding me? The booster I had two months ago is no good, and now they are telling me I need another one? What the heck is going on here? ......

You can watch Trudeau say these crazy things here.

The Freedom Convoy trucker protest is when I really started tuning in to what Justin Trudeau was saying, how he was behaving and the tyrannical decisions he began making. Trudeau has been on an extreme tyranny kick the past few years, and really seems to be enjoying himself and his ability to impose whatever nightmarish scenario he wishes with seemingly minimal pushback from Canadians.

He invoked the Emergencies Act (passed by Parliament way back in 1988) and shut down people’s bank accounts, not just of the truckers but even those who supported and aided the truckers. I would suspect Trudeau is going to be met with resistance from the people if he thinks another round of plandemic theater is justified.  In the video above Trudeau uses a mixture of wild hand gestures, frequent bug eyes, and spastic verbal inflections which show how truly deranged this manchurian candidate with a dictator complex is becoming. ......



A key theme I have tried to illustrate here is the need to stand up for the forgotten victims of medicine.  This is a personal issue for me because I have formed a close connection with many of these victims. More importantly however, there is an inherent self interest in all of us standing up for them because typically malicious programs are first tested out on vulnerable groups no one will speak up for, and then once they have been sufficiently tested out, implemented on the general population. 

For example, much of what has happened with COVID-19 precisely follows what happened with the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  At that time, Fauci deliberately kept a variety of effective treatments for AIDS off the market, instead pushing through a deadly and ineffective (but highly lucrative) drug to treat HIV, AZT.  Once AZT entered the market, rather than end the epidemic, it significantly worsened the course of AIDS (this book and this book provide the best summary of what happened and this history allowed me to predict the identical course that COVID-19 followed).

Because the gay community was still heavily marginalized in the late 1980s, despite being extremely outspoken and often accusing Fauci of being a mass murderer, their plight was ignored and Fauci instead became the most powerful scientist in America. Since then, his influence has grown and he has transformed the NIH (and related agencies) into pharmaceutical pipelines that prioritize profits over human lives. ................

.... Contemporarily, one of the best examples of this principle lies within the COVID-19 response where countless critical rules were flagrantly violated by pandemic profiteers. Deadly hospital protocols with no evidence supporting them were mandated throughout America, untested experimental vaccines with highly concerning safety data were rushed to the market, the manufacturers of these deadly products obtained complete immunity from any harms they caused, and the general populace lost their fundamental human rights through forced lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations. Much of this was illegal, but because an "emergency" situation was created, the wiggle room existed to bypass every existing legal protection for the public. Pfizer bent every rule it could, and by doing so gained immense power and made a lot of money.

In the pharmaceutical industry, two recurring issues always emerge:

•How to regularly test countless experimental drugs with high potential toxicities in order to identify the one that could become a commercial success.

•How to create guaranteed markets for unsafe pharmaceuticals of questionable benefit.

In most cases, bribery plays a key role in addressing these challenges. For example, I documented the Bush family's involvement with forcing SSRI antidepressants onto the market and the FDA’s subsequent decades of complicity with suppressing all evidence of the extreme harm from these drugs—the FDA ignored a tsunami of credible adverse reports, put gag orders on employees who tried to report them, authored fake studies defending SSRIs and even fought against congressional investigations. This saga I would argue provides an excellent case study for understanding many aspects of the FDA’s egregious conduct throughout COVID-19. .........................





Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


The Russians called their move into Ukraine last February a “special military operation” for a reason. The description was precise. It was not a “war” prosecuted on the people of Ukraine. Russia could have completely disabled the Zelensky regime in an afternoon with air power, but they did not want to smash up the country’s vital infrastructure and foreclose the peoples’ future.

The operation was designed to expel Ukrainian military forces from their forward dug-in positions along the Donbas frontier, where they had been shelling, harassing, and killing the Russian-speaking population for eight years — ever since the 2014 CIA-backed Maidan “color Revolution” brought Ukraine under American control.

The precipitating event of the operation begun last winter was the renewed threat to bring Ukraine into NATO, for the purpose of putting bases on Russia’s border. Russia would not tolerate that any more than America would tolerate Russian bases planted across our border with Mexico. The special operation was mounted to reestablish firm boundaries, both geographically and in geopolitical psychology, for an adversary, the West, who displayed an increasingly psychotic drive to smash all boundaries that make civilized life possible, even in their own countries.

Since then, the US has poured money into Ukraine at the rate of about $10-billion a month for the purpose of prolonging the struggle in Ukraine. We’re doing this at a moment in history when the US faces grave financial breakdown, along with the countries of the European Union and the UK. Nothing about our involvement in Ukraine is in the interest of the American people. Our foreign policy establishment has shown a blind animus toward Russia for no apparent good reason.

At this point reasonable people might conclude that it is for a bad reason. Increasingly it looks like a desperate diversion from the technocrat coup perpetrated by a supranational cabal emanating out of Davos, as led by the megalomanics at the World Economic Forum (WEF). The coupsters also happen to be intriguing behind America’s Democratic Party and the White House regime of the obvious tool, “Joe Biden.”

To digress from Ukraine for a moment, let’s consider the perilous condition of “Joe Biden’s” regime just now. All the “narratives” — the miasma of lies the regime has generated in its campaign to wreck our country — are falling apart. Much of this centers on the criminal misbehavior of the FBI, the regime’s clean-up crew, which has lost control of the clean-up. If the conservative opposition seizes majority control of the US House of Representatives on November 8, all the US players in this coup will be called to testify.

This includes the perpetrators of RussiaGate (of which the Ukraine mess is a continuation); the perps of the Covid-19 bioweapon op that will end up killing more Americans from the “vaccines” and the economic blowback of lockdowns as died from the virus itself; the backstage perps of the censoring and cancellation initiative run through the news and social media; the perps who arranged the ballot shenanigans in the 2020 elections; the perps who supported the Antifa and BLM riots of that same year; the perps behind the Mar-a-Lago raid; and, most threatening of all to the regime, the perps who concealed the Hunter Biden laptop evidence of international bribery and treason committed by the current President of the United States. He knows it, he can sniff the danger, as do the rogues and degenerates behind him. Hence, his recent mendacious fulminations against “MAGA Republicans [being] a threat to our democracy” and his ramped-up FBI police-state antics against Donald Trump and his associates. “Joe Biden” must sense that he is going down.

The New York Times today is ballyhooing the Ukraine military’s “lightning advance” east of Kharkov. I’d argue that what The Times wants you to see is not exactly what is happening. Rather the Russians appear to have made an orderly, tactical retreat from the outskirts of Kharkov, inducing the NATO-trained Ukraine forces eastward across the Siverskyi Donets River and out into the flat, open country where they will be cut off, cauldroned, and slaughtered. Everything that NATO and US have done in this conflict has been a stupid move. Why should this one be an exception? 

At the same time, Russia has hit a number of power generation plants around Ukraine, leaving many Ukrainians without lights, hot water, communications — in short, what’s needed to remain civilized. This was exactly what Russia had hoped to avoid the past eight months, but the obdurate pathological idiocy of our country’s leaders has forced Russia to send a harsher message to provoke some rational thought here about ending this conflict. There is even chatter on the web that Russia is about to declare that the special military operation is now a war, with all that implies about targets. .......



..... If we, instead, wish to achieve a different outcome we may have to seek a different route and that route may lie in your husband’s previously stated good intentions.

Yes, I mean the platform upon which he so laudably ran for the office of President of Ukraine, the platform upon which he won his historic landslide victory in the democratic election in 2019. He stood on the election platform of the following promises.
  1. To end the civil war in the East and bring peace to the Donbas and partial autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk.
  2. And to ratify and implement the rest of the body of the Minsk 2 agreements.
One can only assume that your husband’s electoral policies didn’t sit well with certain political factions in Kiev and that those factions persuaded your husband to diametrically change course ignoring the peoples mandate. Sadly, your old man agreed to those totalitarian, anti-democratic dismissals of the will of the Ukrainian people, and the forces of extreme nationalism that had lurked, malevolent, in the shadows, have, since then, ruled the Ukraine. They have, also since then, crossed any number of red lines that had been set out quite clearly over a number of years by your neighbors the Russian Federation and in consequence they, the extreme nationalists, have set your country on the path to this disastrous war.

I won’t go on.

If I’m wrong, please help me to understand how?

If I’m not wrong, please help me in my honest endeavors to persuade our leaders to stop the slaughter, the slaughter which serves only the interests of the ruling classes and extreme nationalists both here in the West, and in your beautiful country, at the expense of the rest of us ordinary people both here in the West, and in the Ukraine, and in fact ordinary people everywhere all over the world. ...



A typical U.S. attack on a foreign country begins with a swarm of cruise missiles which will disable the countries basic infrastructure. The U.S. attack on Iraq and other countries demonstrated that electricity and water supply will be gone in first days of a U.S. waged war.

Over more than 200 days the Russian special military operation in Ukraine had never attacked the basic infrastructure of the country. When the Ukraine used its electrified railway network to bring in weapons from the 'west' the Russian forces only took out electric substations that supplied the railway. But it never attacked the general electricity production for the population. The lights in Ukraine staid on.

One thus wonders about the Ukrainian decision makers and their 'western' intelligence minders who thought that attacking electricity networks under Russian control would somehow benefit their cause. ......

By systematically attacking the power infrastructure in Russia and in Russian held territory the Ukrainian government has launched deliberate terror attacks against the populations in those areas.

It seemed to have forgotten the remarks of Russian President Vladimir Putin who had said:
[E]veryone should know that, by and large, we have not started anything in earnest yet.
..... The Russian attacks were a mere warning shot. It can take out ALL of Ukraine's power infrastructure at any time:

Will the Ukrainian leadership pay heed to the warning?

Don't bet on that. As long as 'western' media cover for the Zelenski regime, by not reporting on its preceding efforts to disrupt power supplies in Russia and in Russian held territory, such attacks will naturally generate more false sympathy for the Ukrainian side. ...


It’s been a dynamic last few days in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And it’s also put the issue of often dubious quality of war-related information front and center. That applies most of all to the kinetic war, as in the fighting. But it also applies to the economic war.

Even though this post will be mainly about military operations, let’s not bury the lede. We’ve spoken again and again about timetables, how market time moves faster than political time. Market time also moves faster than military time. It looks ever more likely that the speed of developments in the real economy and markets will well outpace the resolution of the war. We can see some dim recognition of that possibility with government officials in Europe preparing for unrest via increasing policing. ...

... Russian defeat or pullback? As a reflexive skeptic, I was bothered by the emotionality of many of the takes. This is a very thinly populated area, mainly with small settlements. The population of Izyum is only 45,000. In the early Kharkiv “offensive” both sides had pushed each other back and forth with few men and few casualties.

As Alexander Mercouris pointed out, Russia has earlier planned to use Izyum as a key foundation for moving further south. But they found the advance blocked by a very heavily bunkered “Sherwood forest”. So Izyum became a bit of an albatross: not useful for prosecuting the war, and subject to attacks from Ukraine.

The widespread initial reaction was that Ukraine had forced Russia out, when this operation looks more like a pullback. There were few Russian casualties, no evidence of a rout or even an over-hasty retreat.1 Larry Johnson pointed out that modern militaries do not turn on a dime and that Russia had to have planned to leave.

... What about all that terrain, and the civilians? Part of the distress is falling for map thinking, which is normally imperative in a conflict but is not the driving framework for Russia this campaign. It is out to destroy Ukraine’s warmaking capacity. It needs to clear the Donbass as a key aim of the Special Military Operation, but territorial targets beyond that are elective,2 and are chosen significantly to advance the destruction of the Ukraine forces. Experts have pointed out repeatedly that in the fighting in Donbass, Russia has often pulled back in the face of a Ukraine advance, which suits Russia just fine, since those advances often make the Ukraine forces more exposed.

But but but…Russia abandoned all those civilians who’d been friendly to the tender ministrations of the SBU. That seems to be much less true than Telegram hand-wringing would have you believe .....



The UK and Commonwealth may be mourning the passing of Queen Elizabeth II yesterday.  I am in mourning as well, but for a very different reason:  the gathering in the Ramstein air base in Germany yesterday reshuffled the deck on Western military and financial assistance to Ukraine, raising contributions to the ongoing holy crusade against Russia from still more nations and adding new, still more advanced precision strike weapons to the mix of deliveries to Kiev. It was an open summons to the Kremlin to escalate in turn, as were the test firing the same day of a new intercontinental rocket, the Minuteman III, from Vandenberg air base in California and the unannounced visit to Kiev yesterday of not only Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was featured in Western media accounts, but also other top officials of the Biden administration. The most notorious member of this delegation was surely Blinken’s deputy, Victoria Nuland, who had stage managed the February 2014 coup that put in power in Kiev the Russia-hating regime that Zelensky now heads.

 The Russians may be compelled to take the bait due to the course of military action on the ground. As now becomes clear, they have just suffered some losses in very heavy ground and artillery fighting these past few days around Kharkov. The Ukrainian gains were facilitated by the advanced weaponry recently arrived from NATO countries, by the targeting data they are receiving from the U.S. and from off-stage tactical direction from NATO officers.  By ‘take the bait,’ I mean the Russians may escalate to all out war on Ukraine. .....

What followed was something the Russians evidently did not expect, namely a well prepared and implemented assault on their positions around the northeastern city of Kharkov, Ukraine’s second largest city. Kharkov was briefly surrounded by Russian forces at the start of the war, but was left in relative peace as the Russians refocused their strategy on taking the Donbas and avoiding major urban warfare except in one place, Mariupol.  Exactly what the Russian game plan has been was recently explained in a remarkable paper published by a certain ‘Marinus’ in the Marine Corps Gazette. 

...... So, what did Solovyov have to say? First, that Ramstein marked a new stage in the war, because of the  more threatening nature of the weapons systems announced for delivery, such as missiles with accuracy of 1 to 2 meters when fired from distances of 20 or 30 kilometers thanks to their GPS-guided flight, in contrast to the laser-guided missiles delivered to Ukraine up till now. In the same category, there are weapons designed to destroy the Russians’ radar systems used for directing artillery fire.  Second, that Ramstein marked the further expansion of the coalition or holy crusade waging war on Russia.  Third, that in effect this is no longer a proxy war but a real direct war with NATO and should be prosecuted with appropriate mustering of all resources at home and abroad.

Said Solovyov, Russia should throw off constraints and destroy the Ukrainian dual use infrastructure which makes it possible to move Western weapons across the country to the front.  The railway system, the bridges, the electricity generating stations all should become fair targets.  Moreover, Kiev should no longer be spared missile strikes and destruction of the ministries and presidential apparatus responsible for prosecution of the war.

..... If any of these ideas put out by Solovyov last night are indeed implemented by the Kremlin, then the present confrontation in and over Ukraine will truly become globalized, and we have the outlines of what may be called World War III.  However, I note that the use of nuclear weapons, tactical or otherwise, does not figure at all in the set of options that official Moscow discusses in relation to the challenges it faces in its Ukraine operation. ......

These various problems in dealing with the energy crisis that Europe created for itself by imposing sanctions on Russia may well be intractable and may well lead to spontaneous protests in a number of European countries this fall.   

There is no anti-war movement on the Old Continent to speak of.  So popular protests over the ‘heat or eat’ dilemma being imposed from the chanceries on the people without anything resembling public debate may be the salvation of us all if they induce war mongering politicians to resign.



Most Americans are unaware how close Russia and Ukraine came to ending the current war in April.

Last March 27, Ukraine president Zelensky told his people "Our goal is obvious – peace and the restoration of normal life in our native state as soon as possible."


Ukraine’s Western-backed leader Volodymyr Zelensky opened the New York Stock Exchange telling Wall Street his country is “open” for foreign corporations to exploit it with $400 billion in state selloffs.



................... I am not familiar with the Russian planning system, but I am pretty sure the Russians follow a similar procedure to JOPES. It is important to understand this with reference to the offensive taking place around Kharkov. The Russian forces started moving into the area on Thursday, 8 September. And we are talking about hundreds of trucks, tanks, towed artillery and troops.

So, was Russia caught by surprise? No. They had at least one week’s warning of the impending Ukrainian attack. If you want to believe that Russia’s intelligence service is incompetent or was deceived in this operation, enjoy the fantasy. 



.............. In other words, the AFU found a weak spot in the Russian front and went for it.

Are we to celebrate this as some kind of apocalyptic victory—not a decisive defeat for the Russians, but the decisive defeat, a radical shift in the fortunes of war?

 No, thanks. The implications of this turn—psychological, political, and so on—are yet to be determined. But the long arc of this conflict has not changed. Russian forces still retain overwhelming superiority—ground, air, artillery, matériel, supply.  The AFU’s losses have been heavy by Kyiv’s admission. Ukraine is still a corrupt basket-case economy with unstable institutions. These are “facts on the ground.” 

But never mind that. The new drift among Western officials and media is that Ukraine’s march to victory has begun. I am impressed by the coordination of this spin campaign, even if it is transparently spin, but this is what an information monoculture is for, after all.  .....

... Independent media—“There he goes again!”—have made accurate accounts of the Ukraine conflict available to those paying attention and within the limits of their resources. The question is when sound reporting and analysis will break through the placid, everything-is-all-right surface of the mainstream press and broadcasters. We are beginning to see this now—tears in the tissue of lies, if you will forgive the mixed metaphor.  This marks a significant turn, in my read. ...



........ Russia must adapt to this.

The most mentioned demand in the pro-Russian commentariat yesterday was to "take off the gloves" - to seriously interdict 'western' deliveries of weapons, to destroy Ukrainian bridges and other dual-use infrastructure, to switch from a 'Special Military Operation' towards war.

Why hasn't the Russia's political leadership done this yet?

After observing it for two decades I have concluded that the Russian political leadership, foremost its current leader Vladimir Putin, is driven by two guiding principles. The first is to follow the will of the people. The second are rational policies. The high ratings of Putin and other political leaders have in independent Russian polls is not by chance. It is the result of policies that are a.) rational and well explained and b.) thoroughly democratic in that they follow the public opinion of the majority of the people. They do not allow particular interest groups to have an oversized influence on it. ...

.......... The first phase of the war was about pushing the Ukrainian government into an early agreement. The threat to Kiev was designed to achieve that. It nearly worked. At the end of March Kiev agreed to fulfill Russian demands. Then Boris Johnson was sent to push for prolonging the war to "weaken Russia". The Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenski has since obeyed that order.

Russia pulled back from Kiev and started phase two of the war. Since then the Luhansk oblast and the land corridor to Crimea, especially Mariupol, have been won. The liberation of the Donetsk Republic has stalled. The number of Russian and allied forces fighting the war was kept steady or even decreased over time. Meanwhile the Ukrainian forces have grown manifold. They are getting a very significant amount of arms from 'western' sources and new promises to keep those supplies coming. Even when they are armed to a lesser degree, higher numbers of men do matter over time.

This made potentially costly defeats, like recently at the Izium front, possible. The Russian military has readjusted to this threat by decreasing the held territory and by concentrating on the original aims of the war.

The Russian public, which at first did not fully understand why the war was necessary, has since grown in its awareness. It now understands the big game that is played against its country. It may soon demand to adjust the level of resources put into the war to the one needed for a decisive victory. Polls will clarify if or when that point is reached. ....

.... Still, the war must be won on Ukrainian grounds. Russia must up its game. On July 7, in a session with Duma leaders and party factions heads, Putin said:
Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. Well, what can I say? Let them try. We have already heard a lot about the West wanting to fight us ”to the last Ukrainian.“ This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but that seems to be where it is going. But everyone should know that, by and large, we have not started anything in earnest yet.
Well, maybe now is the time to do so.




Other GeoPolitical Fare:


......... For Canadians who had thought they would no longer be forced to endure watching their Prime Minister slavishly declare his oaths of fealty (and oaths of secrecy) to an inbred monarch sitting on the other side of the ocean as had occurred in 2017 they will be very disappointed. Canada’s Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866 demands that both houses of Parliament are required to take pledges of allegiance after the deaths of all sitting monarchs. That’s right, every single member of the supposedly “elected and democratic” government of Canada must declare their oaths of fealty not to the people or non-existent constitution, but to some inbred family bloodline on the other side of the world.

Similar oaths will be read by elected officials across every other Commonwealth Five Eyes member state.

It is thus worth asking, is this institution of hereditary powers which Charles has inherited just a ceremonial gig with no real substance or influence behind it?

Although the majority of citizens including British subjects believe this to be the case, the facts point to a very different reality.  ...





When Green fanatic Robert Habeck, posing as Germany’s Economy Minister, said earlier this week “we should expect the worst” in terms of energy security, he conveniently forgot to spell out how the whole farce is a Made in Germany cum Made in Brussels crisis.




Law 5371, which strips back labour protections, has been ratified. Is there more to come?



Orwellian Fare:

How propaganda works

......... I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.

Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, better connected.

Are we? Or do we live in a “Media Society” where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power? ......

.... In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke a silence.

“U.S. foreign policy,” he said, is “best defined as follows: Kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in.” The celebrated dramatist continued:
It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.
In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Pinter said this:
The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage—that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the “hypnosis” he referred to was the “submissive void” Leni Riefenstahl described.

“It’s the same,” he replied. “It means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we don’t recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. That’s the submissive void.” 

‘War is an economic necessity.’
In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 11 September 2001 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.

Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called “forever wars”: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies. ...

... In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. “Defenestrated” is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.

The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking. When Julian and WikiLeaks could win readers and prizes for The Guardian, The New York Times, and other self-important “papers of record,” he was celebrated.

..... When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat  already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s The Grayzone, MintPress News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, CounterPunch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone, and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.



...... Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

........... The cases I have described are early signs of this turn for the worse. But if they are symptoms, they are also causes. It is possible to be both, after all. This is the power of media when put to perverse purpose.

......... “What happened no longer mattered. Balanced sourcing no longer mattered. Accuracy no longer mattered. The work of witnessing no longer mattered. Conformity mattered.”



the spectacle of the modern political age is really quite a thing to behold. no sooner has a global group spent 3 years grabbing and even exceeding economic and societal controls not seen since the 30’s (when you know, actual fascists and their envious american emulators like FDR were diligently deepening and extending the great depression) and placing half the thumbs in DC upon the scales of media, social or otherwise, to stifle recognition and dissent than they turn fiercely upon you and demand:.............

....... and experts ALWAYS lean authoritarian and totalitarian because “where you stand depends upon where you sit” and those are the systems that seat experts upon thrones of power and ethical prestige.

even when they do not rule outright, these groups all play kingmaker. they tell you what “the science™” is on health and climate and labor policy. they tell you how to rear and educate your children. but 90%+ of it is basically made up nonsense.

there is no special competency in these groups and if any does manage to gather, it’s rapidly torn down and supplanted by orthodoxy and buried beneath fawning media coverage and the selection bias driven kowtowing of politicians seeking pretext for power grabs.



False Flag Anniversary Fare:

Twenty-one years have disappeared behind us, yet it seems like yesterday. And yet again, it seems like long, long ago.

... That was my introduction to the attacks. Twenty-one years have disappeared behind us, yet it seems like yesterday. And yet again, it seems like long, long ago.

Over the next few days, as the government and the media accused Osama bin Laden and 19 Arabs of being responsible for the attacks, I told a friend that what I was hearing wasn’t believable; the official story was full of holes, with the collapse of Building 7 leading the way. It was a reaction that I couldn’t fully explain, but it set me on a search for the truth. I proceeded in fits and starts, but by the fall of 2004, with the help of the extraordinary work of David Ray Griffin (see Bush and Cheney: How they Ruined America and the World) and other early skeptics, I could articulate the reasons for my initial intuition. I set about creating a college course on what had come to be called 9/11.

But I no longer refer to the events of that day by those numbers. Let me explain why.

By 2004 I was convinced that the U.S. government’s claims (and The 9/11 Commission Report) were fictitious. They seemed so blatantly false that I concluded the attacks were a deep-state intelligence operation whose purpose was to initiate a national state of emergency to justify wars of aggression, known euphemistically as “the war on terror.” The sophistication of the attacks, and the lack of any proffered evidence for the government’s claims, suggested that a great deal of planning had been involved.

Yet I was chagrined and amazed by so many people’s lack of interest in researching arguably the most important world event since the assassination of President Kennedy. I understood the various psychological dimensions of this denial, the fear, cognitive dissonance, etc., but I sensed something else as well. For so many people their minds seemed to have been “made up” from the start. I found that many young people were the exceptions, while most of their elders dared not question the official narrative. This included many prominent leftist critics of American foreign policy. Now that 21 years have elapsed, this seems truer than ever. .....


What will the next lie be?

On 9/11/2001 the WTC Twin Towers collapsed in explosions after a couple of jet planes ran into them. The dramatic images are burned into all of our memories.

At 5:20 PM that day, during the evening news, WTC building 7, "The Lehman Building" as described by the BBC newscaster, collapsed into its own footprint unnoticed and unexplained. The BBC newscaster announced its collapse on British TV, standing by an open window, through which WTC-7 could be seen standing. The timing of the BBC announcement was a little off. The controlled demolition must have been delayed a few minutes.

The raw video footage from different cameras and angles, of the collapse of WTC7 is here. No drama, just a perfectly controlled drop in freefall time. ...

... The University of Alaska, Fairbanks performed engineering and structural analysis of the sudden, unconstrained collapse of WTC-7:
"This is a study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) — a 47-story building that suffered a total collapse at 5:20 PM on September 11, 2001, following the horrible events of that morning. The objective of the study was threefold: (1) Examine the structural response of WTC 7 to fire loads that may have occurred on September 11, 2001; (2) Rule out scenarios that could not have caused the observed collapse; and (3) Identify types of failures and their locations that may have caused the total collapse to occur as observed...
  The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building."
That is the open-window to the rest of the world of lies, constructed around the events of 9/11/01, pre-constructed, and released in perfect timing to build the narrative to justify the "Global War On Terror", which was a grab of oil-producing lands, and the critical Central Asian​ hub of afghanistan, from where opium and heroin could be exported to Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the world. 

  The world of lies, bending our perceptions of reality, worked to (adequately) unify Americans behind a military policy of global domination, which extracted wealth through the brutal enforcement of $US loans and commerce. ....


9/11 After 21 Years

........... What the government did instead of an investigation was to quickly destroy all the evidence. The massive steel beams of the towers clearly cut at an angle by high temperature explosives were quickly collected over objections by fire marshals, shipped out of the country in order to get rid of the evidence, and sold as scrap metal in Asia. No explanation or even admission was given for the molten steel still under the ruble weeks after the event. The testimony of more than a hundred, firemen, police, and building maintenance workers that they experienced explosions all over the towers, including one in the basement before the alleged airliners even hit the towers, was ignored. That the three buildings collapsed into their own footprints as in controlled demolition was ignored. That the BBC reporter announced the collapse of the third building 30 minutes before it happened while she was standing in front of the still standing building was ignored.

But Americans were sitting ducks for their deception, as they always are. Americans, self-righteous, content in the goodness of their country with the belief reinforced by patriotism and flag-waving were pleased to believe that they were attacked, as President Bush said, because America is so good.

One wonders if today, after 21 years of Identity Politics, Aversive Racism, Critical Race Theory, transgender theory, the NY Times’ 1619 Project, the demonization of our Founding Fathers, destruction of their reputations and removal of their statues, and the glorification of perversity, Americans would still have the confidence in their goodness to fall victim to another 9/11 deception? ........



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

In This Disaster We Are All, Ultimately, Innocent

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Whenever I talk about the way our species is sliding toward annihilation via nuclear armageddon or environmental disaster I always get a few people saying something along the lines of, “Good, humans are horrible. The planet will be better off without us.”

This attitude generally seems to be born of frustration. People learn about what’s happening to our world and begin to see how easy it would be to change course if not for the greed and megalomania of our rulers, as well as the obedience of the rank-and-file public and its credulous acceptance of the propaganda that keeps them accepting status quo systems, and they get frustrated. Frustrated with a humanity that just won’t come to its senses, even with all the evidence right there to be seen.

That frustration often turns to disgust as people discover that not only do others fail to see what they see, but they actively avoid looking at it even if you point it out to them. You can lay out the evidence for the corruption and unsustainability of status quo politics and the omnicidal, ecocidal depravity of oligarchic imperialism — lay it out right under their noses — and they’ll make up excuses to turn away.

One way of dealing with the psychological discomfort of this situation is to try and distance yourself emotionally from the plight of humanity and say, “Fine, screw it. Let humanity plunge into dystopia and armageddon. The sooner it happens, the better. We deserve it.”

And I understand the sentiment, but to me saying humanity deserves destruction sounds a lot like saying a drug addict deserves to overdose. ....

....... It’s a ridiculous situation, if you think about it. The story of life on this planet has been about organisms trying to avoid being eaten long enough to reproduce, and our species stumbled out of that horrifying predicament with all the same fear responses and stress hormones and now all of a sudden you find yourself sitting in a cubicle with your heart racing as though you’re running from a saber-toothed tiger because you overhear Janice from accounting gossiping about you.

The eat-or-be-eaten dynamic came crashing headlong through the dawn of a new species with a rapidly-evolved cerebral cortex and the sudden capacity for abstract thought, and all that fear and stress kept marching forward from generation to generation entangling itself with this added new element of thought, language and storytelling. This gave rise to societal constructs like religion, government, hierarchy and family power structures, all largely born of the primitive, fear-based desire to control and dominate which we carried with us from our evolutionary ancestors who lived in trees to hide from predators.

..... And then we showed up. We, the people who are currently alive. That’s what we were born into. That’s the wave we rode in on. And that wave is still going.

And we wonder why everyone’s so dysfunctional and self-destructive.

We never really had a chance to build a healthy world. Our ancestors went from running away from monsters with sharp fangs to burning witches and heretics to fighting world wars to giving birth to us, and that wave of fear and chaos carried forward right into our own psyches and into the psyches of everyone else on this planet without skipping a beat. If you look at where we came from and how we got here, it’s amazing we’re even as functional as we are.

.......... In this churning, chaotic tidal wave of evolutionary trauma that we were all born into, the only thing we really have any amount of real control over is whether we mindlessly repeat our conditioning patterns or start bringing consciousness to them. But even that is greatly limited by how much consciousness we have access to at the time; many people are just barely treading water psychologically and don’t often have the space to pause and bring clarity to their own inner processes. A lot of people are just stumbling blindly along, and it’s not ultimately their fault any more than the blindness of an actual blind person.

So we’re all innocent, in the end. Again, we must of course push to bring consciousness to the parts of humanity that have taken a wrong turn — to the war criminals and plutocrats and managers of empire, and all other abusers and the abusive systems which elevate them. But underneath that fierce burst of light there can also be a deep compassion and understanding born of a lucid seeing of how we got here in the first place.



❖

Just stop having a royal family; it’s so dorky. This isn’t Lord of the Rings. They’re like fantasy LARPers running around with swords and scepters and crowns and junk, except fantasy LARP props aren’t normally encrusted with priceless jewels stolen from colonized territories.

❖

British media are even more servile and sycophantic than American or Australian media, which is truly an impressive feat:

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It’s so crazy how many people I’m seeing getting outraged at criticisms of the queen. Imagine being such a bootlicking cuck that you spend your time running around the internet yelling at people who say disparaging things about a dead imperialist asshole.

❖

Step 1: Set up systems that make the world’s populations dependent on global trade.

Step 2: Work toward shoring up control over those systems so that you decide who gets to trade and who doesn’t.

Step 3: Dominate the entire human species using weaponized starvation.

The US empire continually works to strengthen its stranglehold over global economic and financial systems so that it can starve disobedient populations anywhere in the world without firing a shot. Once you get this, you get why the empire sees a multipolar world as such a threat.

If the US empire doesn’t have wildly disproportionate influence over whether earth’s populations can make and use money, those populations suddenly have no need to obey the dictates of Washington. Unilateral sanctions are meaningless if everyone can just ignore them. So there’s literally an entire planet’s worth of power at stake here when we’re talking about the empire’s “great power competition” with Beijing and Moscow, because what that slogan really means is preventing the rise of a true multipolar world where power isn’t as centralized.


Other Quotes of the Week:

deBoer: You may, as you will, support Ukraine’s military. Certainly I have no love for Putin or his invasion. But the emotional investment in this war effort is something very dark, to me, and redolent of America’s hubristic past.

Snyder: Could you imagine being sent to prison for three years if you dared to set your thermostat above 66 degrees Fahrenheit? As you will see below, this is a proposed regulation that is actually being considered in a major European country right now.  If you have not been paying much attention to what is happening in Europe, you need to wake up. 

Ilargi: It’s not very clear what is happening with the Ukraine ‘counterattack’. It’s taken Russia by surprise, for sure, but there appears to have been hardly any fighting. The Russians simply withdrew, with very few casualties or wounded. And this map of the “salient” doesn’t look all that good for Ukraine. Fish in a barrel.

Martyanov: All this merely confirms my long-standing assertion that Western "elites" wouldn't be able to run a public restroom without bankrupting it and drowning it in shit. 



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Almost Autumn Edition

.... Despite not having been a religious adherent past the age of seven, as an adult, I’ve taken a deep interest in religion as a social and cultural phenomenon. To understand human experience and history, you have to grapple with religion. In my youth, I trusted you simply needed to ask people what they believed or perhaps read the books believers claimed to be guided by or hold sacred.

... To delve under the surface of religious belief and practice, you need to think like an anthropologist. But you also must plumb human psychology and evolution to get beyond the purely descriptive, integrating human culture into a broader theoretical framework. Three books deploying the tools of cognitive anthropology were critical for me to understand the universal instincts and intuitions that led to the ubiquity of religion across human societies.

.... Jason Slone’s Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn't operates in the same framework as Atran and Boyer to explore one crucial phenomenon: why do humans not seem to believe the things they explicitly say they believe? Slone is an anthropologist who draws upon his fieldwork in Sri Lanka, where he showed that Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus shared more in common than their avowed sectarian differences advertise. For constitutionally irreligious people, this book is an essential read because it makes more comprehensible otherwise inexplicable behavior. Religion is not axiomatic, it is usually intuitive.

........... The gossip trap: How civilization came to be and how social media is ending it. If you assign time to one “long-read” this month, make it Erik Hoel’s explanation for why human cultural evolution exploded only in the last 10,000 years, and why it might end soon.



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


............. The normalization of views that, a mere decade ago, would have been considered bizarre and extreme is warping the understanding of what extremism is. Against uncontrolled border immigration, Sir? You MAGA fascist bigot extremist. You, Sir, are a threat to our Constitutional Republic.

This is all so much more than a fight against X, where X is the latest pile of drivel from the woke, it’s a fight for the very soul of our nations. Do you want a government that considers those who disagree with it to be extremists? Do you want the right to be able to freely express your opinions and criticisms, however contentious? Do you want your cultural traditions and values to be respected, or only the cultural traditions of those deemed ‘worthy’? Do you want honesty, warts and all?

Everything rests on a proper, truthful, honest and balanced view of history and our journey through that. Those who control history control the present. Those who get to dictate what is extreme, and what isn’t, will end up controlling you.



[Not] Satirical Fare:

The Navy says it has more UFO videos. It doesn’t want to share them.





and, in honour of his birthday:


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