Pages

Thursday, September 15, 2022

2022-09-15

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

Economic and Market Fare:

US Consumer Prices Blow Away Expectations, Rise For 27th Straight Month

... Headline CPI came hotter than expected rising 0.1% MoM vs expectations of -0.1% MoM. That is the 27th straight month of rising inflation. And while the ascent in energy fizzled, with the energy index increasing 23.8% for the 12 months ending August, a smaller increase than the 32.9% increase for the period ending July, the big shock was the food index which increased 11.4% over the last year, the largest 12-month increase since the period ending May 1979, while the food at home index rose 13.5% the largest 12-month increase since the period ending March 1979. ...






... contrary to what you are hearing in the press, which loves to sensationalize things.

There is abundant evidence that inflation pressures are cooling: Non-energy commodity prices are soft (see my last post for lots of charts). Oil is down over 25% in the past four months. The dollar is very strong. Inflation expectations are relatively low and stable (averaging about 2.6% for the past 2 ½ months). Housing prices and new mortgage applications are falling because mortgage rates have doubled so far this year (this means Fed rate hikes are getting lots of traction). Rents are still on the rise, but they are a lagging indicator (rents rise about a year after prices rise, so they will likely begin to stabilize about 6-9 months from now, because prices started falling a few months ago).

Yes, on a year over year basis, it looks like consumer price inflation is still on the rise. But on a 6-mo. annualized basis, which is best for picking up changes on the margin, inflation is falling.

Above all, I can't emphasize enough that this inflation flare-up was not caused by a Fed policy error: it was caused by the federal government's attempt to soften the blow of Covid lockdowns with massive, deficit-financed transfer payments that inflated the money supply. That mistake ended over a year ago, and M2 money supply growth has since decelerated significantly. So the fundamental reason for our current inflation has long since begun to fade in importance. ...



Global corporate profits growth is heading south, according to analysis by JP Morgan economists.


Scotts ramped up production during the pandemic, then consumers shifted and retailers slashed orders, leaving a pile of inventory. It’s now trying to dig its way out.



Many astute bond investors are baffled by rising bond yields. Economic activity is slowing, inflation expectations are falling, the Fed is aggressively fighting inflation, and QT has begun. In the past, those factors were a surefire recipe for a rip-roaring bond rally. Today bond yields defy yesterday’s logic.

Clearly, something else is at play, and we think we know what it is.

Before we share our theory on why bond yields are rising, let’s review how very dependable yield relationships have been turned on their head this year. ............

Summary
Tried and trustworthy relationships are failing bond investors. While powerful and concerning, we think the abnormal relationships are temporary. When the supply and demand for bonds normalize, bond investors will likely realize that economic, inflation and other factors warrant much lower yields.


Kelton: Inflation Hurts Everyone, But So Does Unemployment
Research shows that the pain of unemployment is generalized, not localized. And that it's even more painful than inflation.


Goldman's Credit-Card Losses Are Soaring - "Well Above Subprime Lenders"




An Alignable poll shows hiring freeze among SMBs hits a new record.



Now that every investor is positioned for higher inflation, it's time for the totally unexpected deflationary financial "accident"...

.... Not to say that ZH/GS are alone by any means in late cycle chicanery. It's now becoming clear that today's pundits were only "good" at predicting markets when central banks were guaranteeing a one way trip higher. Now that true price discovery has returned, they can't find their ass with both hands.

On the economy it gets far worse of course because the Fed is now being pushed into making a biblical magnitude policy error. They are using the 1970s demand-side playbook to deal with supply side inflation. 

... And the U.S. Federal deficit has fallen the most in history year over year. And the Fed is tightening the most on both ends in history: They've never simultaneously tightened on the short end and long end by this amount.

As I showed on Twitter recently, the Fed has tightened mortgage rates back to the level of 2008. However, rates rose from a much lower level and at a far greater pace. Whereas in 2007 era, rates rose from 5% to 6.5%. This time they rose from record low 2.5% to 6%. And they did it with home prices at record highs. 

What we are witnessing is extreme RATE SHOCK added on to extreme inflation shock

.... What this all points to is FINANCIAL inflation caused by a combination of asset bubbles and rampant corporate profiteering. Which is why the traditional inflation models are not working.

.... It took 20 years for inflation to become fully entrenched in the 1970s. Throughout that time the U.S. middle class was ascendant with respect to quality of jobs and benefits. This era is NOTHING like that one. But, clearly some people like to learn the hard way.  

What investors are positioned for right now is the worst "inflation" since 1979. What they are about to receive is the worst deflation since 1929.



Quotes of the Week:

Exploding Hubris

Last week Mohamed El-Erian warned investors to get out of these "distorted" markets and hide in cash and short-term t-bills. I highly concur. What makes El-Erian credible is that over the past year he warned the Fed was moving far too slow on inflation and that they ran the risk of slamming on the brakes down the road. And he was right, because that is exactly what they are doing now. They are compounding their earlier mistake of easing for too long by making a larger mistake of tightening too quickly. 


Boockvar: "The next rate hike is going to be only the second time in 40 years that the Fed funds rate is going to exceed the prior peak in a rate hiking cycle"; “This 75 bps rate hike might even be a mistake. We know there’s a lag.”


Musk: "Impending deflation is neither subtle nor secret"

... Of course this whole problem stems from the fact that the Fed uses lagging indicators to set interest rate policy.

... It doesn't matter what these pundits think the Fed should or will do next week because the damage is ALREADY done. 

... Clearly, the Fed's other big mistake was totally ignoring the yield curve and the signals the bond market is sending.

... In summary, the amount of hubris taking place right now is ludicrous. Investors have been conditioned by central banks to ignore all risk. And in turn investor complacency is now feeding back into central bank rate policy error. It's a hubristic death spiral.



“The economy is braking hard,” Sternlicht told the outlet. “If the Fed keeps this up, they are going to have a serious recession and people will lose their jobs.”



Charts: 
1:



...

...

...


(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Patagonia billionaire Yvon Chouinard will surrender all ownership of the privately held retailer, valued at about $3 billion, to two entities that will divert profits toward combating climate change


Targeting the wrong buyers—and producing more greenhouse-gas emissions

IS A GAS GUZZLER actually better for the environment than an electric vehicle? Sometimes.

Ashley Nunes, Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program fellow, and undergraduate economics concentrator Lucas Woodley ’23 found that many electric vehicle (EV) owners—usually wealthy individuals incentivized by federal tax credits to purchase an electric vehicle as a second car—are doing more environmental harm than good. Why? They’re not driving enough.

To build an electric-car battery, manufacturers need lithium, and to find lithium, they need the high-altitude salt flats of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. There, beneath turquoise brine lakes, is mud rich in manganese, potassium, borax, and lithium salts. It’s chemical- and water-intensive to isolate lithium from all that mud, and it takes even more energy to make a functional car battery from it. As a result, building a clean-burning EV battery is twice as greenhouse-gas-intensive as making a conventional internal combustion engine.

The high emissions buy-in of an EV “isn’t a dealbreaker,” Nunes says, because “an electric car is almost always cleaner to drive per mile, compared to a gasoline-powered one. However, to get that advantage, you need to ‘burn off’ the emissions associated with manufacturing the car.” A gas-powered car has an emissions head start, but once the EV is driven enough, it gains a “green lead” with its low per-mile emissions, Nunes says. “It’s this very odd situation where, paradoxically, you need to get people to drive more in order to get an emissions advantage” ......



GeoPolitical Fare:

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) will hold its first in-person summit in Samarkand in Uzbekistan on Thursday after two years.





Pics of the Week:







Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Climate Fare:


2022 is a year of undeniable climate extremes. In Pakistan, unprecedented floods have destroyed over half a million homes and put one third of the country underwater. In China, a drought with no precedent in human history, according to the global expert on extreme temperatures, is forcing semiconductor plants to close so that energy and water can be reserved for domestic use. Europe is suffering its longest drought in 500 years, with no end in sight, and facing energy prices that have risen up to sixfold in a year, with the Ukraine War only partially to blame. Drought in the USA is exposing never-before-seen dinosaur footprints in dried-up rivers.

Who could have seen this coming? Certainly not economists, who predicted that far higher temperatures than today would do only moderate damage to the economy. William Nordhaus, who was given the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on climate change, claimed in 2018 that a 6℃ increase in global temperature would cause GDP to fall by less than 10%. But we're starting to see huge catastrophes across the globe at a temperature rise of just over 1℃. Nordhaus's predictions are starting to look spectacularly wrong, and the New York Times said so just recently in an article titled "Pace of Climate Change Sends Economists Back to Drawing Board". .....

... But what happens when you extrapolate past current temperatures? Then, figuratively speaking, all hell breaks loose: the exponential forecast predicts that when temperatures reach 3℃ above pre-industrial levels, all of GDP will be destroyed. The logistic is only slightly less scary—it predicts that 50% of the economy will be gone at 3℃, and all of it at 5℃.

..... 
That implies a scary future indeed for the remainder of the 21st century. Whereas Nordhaus's quadratic claims the damage to the economy in the 21st century would be minimal—a less than 10% fall in a per capita GDP 4-5 times higher than today's—the exponential and logistic assert that there won't be an economy by the mid to late 21st century.

These functions aren't necessarily correct, but they're certainly not as wrong as Nordhaus's trivial estimates. But if they are even close to what we are going to experience, then it's time to pull out all stops to combat global warming.


********** Murphy: Death by Hockey Sticks

You may be familiar with the term “hockey stick curve,” used describe a trend that has been flat/stable for a very long time, but shoots up at the end of the series in dramatic fashion, resembling the shape of a hockey stick. Hockey can be a violent sport, and it’s easy to get hurt by even one well-aimed swing. Today’s world is being battered from all sides by countless hockey sticks. Mostly, they seem to be targeting Earth’s critters, who are getting bludgeoned unsparingly. But in the end, we’re only harming ourselves.

This post is structured as a gauntlet of hockey stick curves that may leave the reader feeling a bit bruised. Depending on what’s being plotted, many of the graphs shoot up like an exponential, but a few are careening downwards. A theme emerges: the “bads” go up, and the “goods” go down—and not by coincidence.

... All the plots in this post will share the same time axis, from the year 1000 to 2200—even for those lacking information across the whole span. The point will be to emphasize the anomalous nature of recent history: what I call the fireworks show.   Maybe it would be more fair to use a 10,000 year span (civilization), or 200,000 for modern homo sapiens, or even 3 million years for the entire human saga.  On such scales, the present era loses its graceful curve and looks rather more like a sudden brick wall. ....

........ Emissions were negligible until 1850 or so, but have shot up since.  In complete disregard for Kyoto and Paris agreements, each year emits more than the prior one—for the simple fact that fossil fuels power economies like nothing else can.

........ If the exponential fit has any truth to it, we’re cruising toward effective elimination of wild  mammal mass on land by 2050. OMG! Does this result justify ringing an alarm bell, or is it all part of our elegant plan for world domination?

...... As bad as climate change is, it’s not the core problem—just another symptom of a flawed approach to life on this planet. Many of these hockey stick curves were well underway before climate change began to disrupt the environment in recent decades, only to compound already-serious crises. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable technologies and storage will not automatically lower resource demands on the planet, and may well only ramp up the pressure. Just the massive build-out and maintenance of this infrastructure is an enormous draw-down on non-renewable resources and concomitant ecological distress. Ironically, if we somehow achieved “unlimited” energy, I tremble to think what we would use all this energy to do. Without a reversal of mindset, it seems we would simply ratchet up our crushing assault on the non-human world for the sake of short term profit and (ostensible) human benefit.

.... One point to make is that it’s not a problem with humans per se. It’s the system humans have adopted: the one we call our global civilization. But that choice is not written in our genes. We are not obligated to cling to our current (and recent) approach to living on this planet. That’s where any real hope lies. But the change would have to be radical, and performed quickly in order to avert collapse. Thinking it can happen may be its own form of delusion. ...



...


...



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




Canadian federal government knows ivm saves lives, has failed to act


It's in the blood!

“Peer Reviewed Study: 94% of Vaccinated Patients with Subsequent Health Issues Have Abnormal Blood”


It's all in the fine print.

So, I thought I’d break this down with a little information that is only going to upset you…and it doesn’t matter what your previous thoughts were.

It’s upsetting.

But you deserve to know. ..........


Canada's VISP Failure Part 2

Brief remarks on a sensational study from Lombardy, which finds conclusive evidence of SARS-2 infection in a patient sample from 12 September 2019.





A 14-minute video (below) that has been overlooked for nearly two years has now resurfaced, exposing stunning information about the COVID-19 jabs and why health officials don’t want individual vaccine vials examined by independent scientists. The reason, it turns out, is because the vials are all different — and the mRNA in the shots “is not intact.” Both of these pose potentially serious problems.


Radagast: How to destabilize everything: An unprecedented experiment on the human holobiont

I’ve explained a few times on this blog, how I consider it to be a bad idea, to homogenize the human immune response against respiratory pathogens. I believe this is what we did with the SARS-COV-2 vaccines, that SARS-COV-2 evolved in response in a manner that led to negative efficacy and that we’re now dealing with the global consequences.

..... I believe the point is sufficiently demonstrated: You need to be careful with what you’re doing. You’re not “teaching” the immune system something it didn’t know, you’re telling it that you know a superior strategy. It has never really mattered much before, because we have never homogenized the entire population’s immune response at such an unprecedented scale.

The big question I feel like asking is: How are other respiratory pathogens going to be affected by this strange experiment? 

...... I think the correct conclusion to draw is that vaccination is just a technology subject to diminishing returns. It has undeniably worked well against smallpox, but to continually shoot people up with whatever respiratory virus happens to be circulating at the moment seems risky.

Rather than worrying excessively about one virus or another, I think humanity would be best off to recognize that we are a holobiont: We are a community of symbiotic organisms.

............ Sociologists have long noted that the role of medicine in our increased life expectancy is exaggerated. Most of the gain in life expectancy can be attributed to improved nutrition and hygiene. Infant mortality went down dramatically, when Semmelweis figured out that doctors should wash their hands before delivering children, if they had just dissected corpses. Similarly, as we figured out which micronutrients our bodies need, the quality of our immune response against pathogens improved.

A lot of epidemiologists are now eager to give rise to a brave new world, where masks, UVC light and various other measures are used to eradicate not just SARS-COV-2, but effectively all respiratory pathogens. People are unwilling to acknowledge the simple fact that for many of the elderly in nursing homes, left alone, often blind or entirely unable to recognize their own family, an influenza infection is an act of divine mercy.

I believe that without the lockdowns and the vaccines, SARS-COV-2 would have been a non-event: An obscure coronavirus that manages to spread by being novel, but struggles and fails to establish a permanent presence in our population, bumping up into herd immunity and getting stuck in an evolutionary dead end in a handful of immunocompromised hosts who fail to pass the virus on to anyone else.

Through the mass vaccination campaign, we haven’t just turned SARS-COV-2 from a non-event into an ongoing disaster. We may very well have destabilized our entire Holobiont.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Tessa: Here is case number one million of FDA-approved interventions being recalled. Now imagine a world in which the ‘vaccine principle” is applied to these defective masks. In that world, the bureaucrats insist that anything called a “mask” is safe and effective by definition and cannot cause harm—and therefore, anyone saying that these specialty masks can be lethal is spreading dangerous misinformation, etc, etc. Well, we are kind of in that world, except the name of the sacred cow starts with letter “V.”



CO-VIDs of the Week:




TV actress Pauley Perrette had "massive stroke" last year; Tulsa anchor Julie Chin had stroke (on TV) last week; QB Sam Hartman was sidelined by blood clots; and an odd 9-car crash in Mission Viejo



COVID Conspiracy Fare:



Today just something silly, because I’ve altered my neurochemistry. To me this is an interesting intellectual exercise though. If you assumed the government faked statistics, would you notice a bunch of people dying off? The excess mortality statistics right now tend to suggest about 20% more people are dying than usual in most Western nations. If mortality had actually doubled, we would expect governments to hide it. People who produce the statistics wouldn’t feel guilty, they’d think they help to avoid mass panic.

Right now the death rate in my country is said to be about 9.24 per 1000 people per year. But imagine for example, if it had actually doubled. Could you hide such a thing from people? 



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:

Mainstream media, rather than fight the cognitive biases that impede clear view of an enemy, surrender to them.

Over the weekend, while processing the Ukrainian army’s big breakthrough and the Russian army’s headlong retreat, I came across a tweet that said this:  
On Russian state TV, Moscow State University professor Vitaly Tretyakov said (and I'm paraphrasing): “The West thinks there will be social unrest in Russia in order to make the war stop. In reality, there will be social unrest if we don't become more active in this war.”
Is Tretyakov right? Is there more political pressure on Putin to ratchet up his military campaign in Ukraine than to ratchet it down?

........ Still, the main compliment I want to pay him is a backhanded one: His piece nicely corroborates my pet theory about why American journalists—and for that matter a surprising number of American foreign policy elites—have shown so little interest in the political forces impinging on Putin’s decision making even as Putin ponders options that could greatly increase the death and suffering triggered by his invasion of Ukraine.

My theory involves a cognitive bias (familiar to regular readers of NZN) called attribution error, which can cloud, among other things, our understanding of enemies and rivals. It works like this:

When an enemy or rival does something we consider bad, we tend to attribute the bad behavior to the person’s “disposition” (their basic nature) rather than to “situation” (such factors as peer pressure or political pressure or workplace stress or whatever). But if they do something we consider good, we tend to emphasize situational factors, not dispositional ones.

Our enemies and rivals, in other words, do bad things because that’s the kind of people they are and do good things only when pushed toward them by circumstance; attribution error is, among other things, a mechanism for preserving this unflattering framing of them. (With friends and allies it works the other way around: We tend to attribute good things they do to the kind of people they are and bad things they do to peer pressure or a stressful workplace or whatever.)

So if most American journalists and foreign policy elites view Putin as an enemy—and don’t somehow overcome the biased assessment of his motivation this view naturally brings—they’ll tend to ignore or downplay factors in his environment that encouraged him to invade Ukraine. They may note, even dwell on, the fact that some Russians oppose the war, but they’ll be less inclined to highlight Russian factions that support the war.

Which brings us back to that New York Times piece by Anton Troianovski. Though the piece at first seems to defy attribution error—Troianovski does highlight pro-war political pressures in Putin’s environment—the defiance is in the end incomplete. The piece turns out to bear the mark of attribution error. And the amount of scrutiny it takes to see that mark is a tribute to the subtlety with which this cognitive bias can do its work. .....

.... Of course, “Vladimir Putin is a bad man” is an eminently defensible thesis. But back in olden times, when I did some newspaper reporting, we tried to leave judgments like that to editorial writers; the idea was that if you see your journalistic mission as driving home moral judgments about the people you cover, your journalism will suffer.

But that was then. In a digital and tribalized age, there seems to be more pressure on media outlets to play to the passions of readers, especially by underscoring reasons to keep loathing the people they loathe. ....



Wars are not won by psyops. Ask Nazi Germany. Still, it’s been a howler to watch NATOstan media on Kharkov, gloating in unison about “the hammer blow that knocks out Putin”, “the Russians are in trouble”, and assorted inanities.

............ Yet Kharkov may have forced Moscow’s hand to increase the pain dial. That came via a few well-placed Mr. Khinzals leaving the Black Sea and the Caspian to present their business cards to the largest thermal power plants in northeast and central Ukraine (most of the energy infrastructure is in the southeast).

Half of Ukraine suddenly lost power and water. Trains came to a halt. If Moscow decides to take out all major Ukraine substations at once, all it takes is a few missiles to totally smash the Ukrainian energy grid – adding a new meaning to “decommunization”: de-energization.


Five dissident responses to the latest chapter in that war may help us better understand it—and, maybe, also see exactly how it figures in the larger war against the rest of us

For those who may not be inclined to trust “our free press” vis-a-vis the conflict in Ukraine (or any other subject), here are five takes on what’s happened lately over there, from the “Redacted” team, Scott Ritter, The World and We, Russian military journalist Alexander Kots, and Edward Slavsquat. Although they variously differ with each other, altogether they comprise a valuable corrective to the propaganda thundering from “our free press,” whose “coverage” of the conflict has relied on not a single correspondent on the scene, but (it would seem) entirely on the “journalists” in Langley.



Other GeoPolitical Fare:

******** Johnstone: The Specter of Germany Is Rising

The European Union is girding for a long war against Russia that appears clearly contrary to European economic interests and social stability. A war that is apparently irrational – as many are – has deep emotional roots and claims ideological justification. Such wars are hard to end because they extend outside the range of rationality. ......

................. What this means should be obvious to the French. Historically, the French have defended the consensus rule so as not to be dragged into a foreign policy they don’t want. French leaders have exalted the mythical “Franco-German couple” as guarantor of European harmony, mainly to keep German ambitions under control.

But Scholz says he doesn’t want “an EU of exclusive states or directorates,” which implies the final divorce of that “couple.” With an EU of 30 or 36 states, he notes, “fast and pragmatic action is needed.” And he can be sure that German influence on most of these poor, indebted and often corrupt new Member States will produce the needed majority.

France has always hoped for an EU security force separate from NATO in which the French military would play a leading role. But Germany has other ideas. “NATO remains the guarantor of our security,” said Scholz, rejoicing that President Biden is “a convinced trans-atlanticist.”

.......... There is reason to surmise that current German Russophobia draws much of its legitimization from the Russophobia of former Nazi allies in smaller European countries.

While German anti-Russian revanchism may have taken a couple of generations to assert itself, there were a number of smaller, more obscure revanchisms that flourished at the end of the European war that were incorporated into United States Cold War operations. Those little revanchisms were not subjected to the denazification gestures or Holocaust guilt imposed on Germany. Rather, they were welcomed by the C.I.A., Radio Free Europe and Congressional committees for their fervent anticommunism. They were strengthened politically in the United States by anticommunist diasporas from Eastern Europe.

Of these, the Ukrainian diaspora was surely the largest, the most intensely political and the most influential, in both Canada and the American Middle West. Ukrainian fascists who had previously collaborated with Nazi invaders were the most numerous and active, leading the Bloc of Anti-Bolshevik Nations with links to German, British and U.S. Intelligence.

..... So long as the Soviet Union existed, Ukrainian racial hatred of Russians had anticommunism as its cover, and Western intelligence agencies could support them on the “pure” ideological grounds of the fight against Bolshevism and Communism. But now that Russia is no longer ruled by communists, the mask has fallen, and the racist nature of Ukrainian ultra-nationalism is visible – for all who want to see it.

However, Western leaders and media are determined not to notice.

............. Western politicians and media persuaded the public that the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia was a “humanitarian” war, generously waged to “protect the Kosovars” (after multiple assassinations by armed secessionists provoked Serbian authorities into the inevitable repression used as pretext for the bombing).

But the real point of the Kosovo war was that it transformed NATO from a defensive into an aggressive alliance, ready to wage war anywhere, without U.N. mandate, on whatever pretext it chose.

This lesson was clear to the Russians. After the Kosovo war, NATO could no longer credibly claim that it was a purely “defensive” alliance.

..... When Western leaders speak of “economic war against Russia,” or “ruining Russia” by arming and supporting Ukraine, one wonders whether they are consciously preparing World War III, or trying to provide a new ending to World War II. Or will the two merge? ...



***** CaitOz Fare:

The Trouble With ‘Western Values’ Is That Westerners Don’t Value Them

...... The trouble with “western values” is that westerners don’t value them. They think they value them, but all that reverence for free expression and holding power to account with the light of truth goes right out the window the second they see someone saying something that sharply differs from what their rulers and their propagandists have told them to think. Then they want that person silenced and shut down.

In truth, the most forceful critics of the western empire actually embody these western values infinitely more than empire apologists do. It is the critics of empire who value free speech and holding the powerful to account. It’s the brainwashed bootlickers of the US-centralized empire who are calling for censorship and shouting down anyone who directs fierce oppositional scrutiny toward the most powerful people in the world.



Brian Stelter went from a mainstream media gig to a gig at Harvard. Jen Psaki went from a gig in the Biden administration to a gig in the mainstream media. Mike Pompeo went from a gig in the Trump administration to a gig with a DC think tank. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.

❖

I’m actually less disdainful of the British royal family than I am of all the sniveling sycophants who are worshipping them right now. The royals were born into this ridiculous charade; these losers are choosing it.



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


"They're doing a psychological intervention on a child. They're not qualified to do it. They have no experience or qualifications. And then they're hiding this from parents and creating an identity crisis in a child -- they're creating it -- by teaching this crap..."

Chris Elston brandished his smartphone with the genderbread person infographic on it at the two other diners seated across from us at the sidewalk Mexican cafe. He was speaking of a California policy for teachers to "socially transition" trans-identifying students by using new names and pronouns without parental notice or consent. Indeed, the policy calls for active deception of parents, mandating that teachers continue to use a child's given name and natal pronouns when discussing the student with their parents while using a new name and pronouns in class. Elston speaks in a soft-spoken, simmering, tightly disciplined fury, coming across as dry and matter of fact as a person can whose passion has driven him abandon home and hearth for a nomadic life of proselytizing on the streets of North American cities.

............ I knew, of course, that Billboard Chris was traveling North America and stationing himself on busy streets outside of various institutions complicit in what he had judged to be an ongoing medical scandal of unprecedented scale wearing sandwich boards emblazoned with a rotating set of blunt assertions about the pseudo-religious dogma known as “gender identity” that is in the process of being installed as the baseline understanding of gender for American children: CHILDREN CANNOT CONSENT TO PUBERTY BLOCKERS. GENDER IDEOLOGY DOES NOT BELONG IN SCHOOLS. CHILDREN ARE NEVER BORN IN THE WRONG BODY. I did not know anything else. I was not, for instance, aware of what I would soon learn after he arrived at the Mexican restaurant where we were drinking margaritas and eating nachos -- that his first brush with notoriety, from which his Twitter moniker was derived, was his sponsorship of a billboard in downtown Vancouver declaring (and I urge any reader who does not already know the message to brace themselves for the shock) "I heart J.K. Rowling."





Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Welsh: Lazy V.S. Uninterested & Quiet Quitting




Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)