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Monday, October 31, 2022

2022-10-31

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


Economic and Market Fare:

What Happens When Inflation Hits 8%... And What Must Happen For Inflation To Fall
uhm, no
everyone keeps pointing to historical "parallels" 
i.e. other times when inflation was this elevated, and what happened next
which just means you're comparing now to the 70s-80s
and it just ain't the same; both causes of inflation and structure economy fundamentally different now; there are no "parallels"



.... Fast forward to today and CPI stands at 8.2%Y, a 40-year high and marginally below its peak of 9.1%Y in June. However, M2 is now growing at just 2.5%Y and falling fast. Given the leading properties of M2 for inflation, the seeds have been sown for a sharp fall next year. The implied fall in CPI outlined in Exhibit 1 would be highly out of consensus, and while it won’t necessarily play out exactly as in our chart, we believe it's directionally correct. This has implications for Fed policy and rates. Indeed, part of our call for a rally assumes we are closer to a pause/pivot in the Fed’s tightening campaign, and while we don’t expect to see a dramatic shift at next week’s meeting, the markets have a way of getting in front of Fed shifts. In short, investors may be as offside on inflation today as they were in March 2021, just in the opposite direction.


......... Bottom line, inflation has peaked and is likely to fall faster than most expect, based on M2 growth. This could provide some relief to stocks in the short term as rates fall in anticipation of the change.



........ The other big question mark in the course of inflation is non-shelter services. Here too we are likely to see a good picture. Outside of shelter, inflation in core services is relatively moderate and seems to be headed downward.

......... However, the most important number in the October report will be wage growth. There is no plausible story where the economy sustains a high rate of inflation, if wages are only growing at a moderate pace.

We already got some evidence of slowing wage growth in the Employment Cost Index (ECI) for the third quarter that was released last week. That showed private sector compensation increasing at a 4.4 percent annual rate in the third quarter, down from a 6.0 percent annual rate in the second quarter. This pace is still too high to be consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target, but the direction of change is important. The rate of wage growth is clearly slowing even with unemployment rates at very low levels and vacancy rates at historic highs.

The other major wage series that we rely upon is the average hourly earnings (AHE) series, which will be part of Friday’s report. This series differs from the ECI by looking at average wages for all workers. The ECI holds the mix of industry and occupations constant. The change in mix generally does not have much impact, but the two indices have often differed a great deal in the pandemic recession and recovery.

In the downturn, the AHE series showed much more rapid wage gains because many of the lowest paid workers lost their jobs. This raised the average wage by changing the composition of the workforce, even if the pay of people in each occupation and industry did not change. During the recovery this composition effect went the other way, as low-paid workers got their jobs back.

There was also an issue where many workers may have gotten a pay increase by changing their job title. If a worker at a fast food restaurant was promoted to assistant night manager, but their work did not change at all, the associated pay increase would be picked up in the AHE series, but not in the ECI.

Anyhow, the AHE does show evidence of rapidly slowing wage growth. In the last two months, the AHE has grown at just a 0.3 percent rate. This translates into a 3.6 percent rate of annual wage growth. The monthly data are erratic and subject to large revisions, so these numbers must be treated as provisional.

However, if they hold up through the revisions in the October report, and wage growth in the October data is consistent with the prior two months, then we will have pretty solid evidence that wage growth has slowed sharply. In fact, a 3.6 percent annual rate is only slightly higher than the 3.4 percent rate we saw in 2019, when the inflation rate was comfortably under the Fed’s 2.0 percent target.

If the rate of wage growth is in fact 3.6 percent, it is almost impossible to envision a scenario in which inflation remains uncomfortably high. ......



.... But, according to the Goldman trader, in the latest series of NikiLeaks tweets this morning, the WSJ's Fed mouthpiece is seen as aggressively trying to dial that back ahead of the Fed’s meeting on Wednesday by suggesting that the US consumer is much stronger than otherwise perceived (this is dead wrong, of course, but as a reminder, this is all about setting up the narrative that contains the Fed's reaction function):

“Consumers have a big cushion of savings. Corporations have lowered their debt-service costs. For the Fed, a more resilient private sector means that when it comes to rate rises, the peak or “terminal” policy rate may be higher than expected“ ........






Quotes of the Week:

Hail: I think we have got it broadly right again. The forecast that central banks and most of the economics profession would follow the fashion and inadvisedly keep raising interest rates as though a demand-driven wage-price spiral was driving inflation rates up is proving correct.
This is despite the lack of evidence that interest rates are an effective tool for managing inflation and the fact that the main impact of raising rates is to redistribute income from those with net financial liabilities to those with net financial assets, until something breaks.
...
Meanwhile though, those central banks might rise rates enough to trigger not only the involuntary unemployment of others which they hope for but such an impact on those with net financial liabilities as to produce unintended consequences on asset markets, leading to defaults.
This also will bring inflation down, should it happen, and they can congratulate themselves on being tough and on 'the recession we had to have' when we didn't have to have it at all. What we need is peace, a definite end to the pandemic and action on climate change.



Charts: 
1:



...
...



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

How to build a vision



Other Fare:

Satellite tag data suggests five-month-old migratory bird did not stop during voyage which took 11 days and one hour to reach Tasmania




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”


Regular Fare [i.e. Everyday Life Bullshit]:


......Ever get the sense there are things our media hides from us? Hmm. Ever wonder why enormous protests against the policies of the Exceptional Empire and its attack dog, NATO, seem, um, to be downplayed? Ever think our corporate news outlets behave more like the propaganda arm of our neoconservative state department and military than a free press? Well, if so, you may be onto something.


and it's time we the people stopped standing for it.

i have no great faith in or fondness for either of the two major US political parties, but the behavior of team donkey has of late really gone beyond the pale.

deliberate deception has reached a level that cannot be countenanced and the sheer pervasiveness and scale of it has become a threat to societal sanity. it’s so big that the mind struggles to bound it and therefore those refuting it are made to look like the crazy ones because it seems like you are arguing against absolutely everything all the time.

but is it really crazy? regimes do this all the time. ascribe such to china or the soviets and everyone nods sagely and says “yup, regimes like that sure do lie all the time!” but then they cast their gazes at home and say “well, it could never happen here!” despite increasingly similar systems and systemic incentives.

it’s a curious blind spot.

it’s also rapidly unraveling. ....



Obama, with a well-worn penchant for lecturing mere citizens for having the occasional audacity to raise their voices and talk back to their rulers and other experts, was not about to let Friday's vicious attack on Paul Pelosi go to waste. He led the Democratic Party charge in making it a campaign issue in its own right, conflating the assault on Pelosi with the plague of "incivility" sweeping the nation. 

........... The trouble is, despite what these professionals say, the government and its two establishment parties are not just like a family. The CIA is neither intelligent nor part of a "community."  Calling the US war machine the Department of Defense is a sick joke. But it's ever so civil.

Politics is not and never was civil. Nor should it be. It's always a struggle and it's often messy. Therefore, the top-down lectures about "civility" from a former president who deported more people, dropped more bombs, prosecuted more whistleblowers and started more wars than any of his predecessors are laughable on their face.

Obama hectoring others about "civility" is, however, the time-honored way in which rulers shut down opposition and the voicing of legitimate concerns. The ploy of immediately going on the offensive against powerless people also serves to conveniently absolve themselves of culpability for their own foul deeds. After all, since they themselves have such impeccably good manners and have such well-modulated, reasonable tones of voice, they can get away with anything.





Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


.... However, his second shoe that fell at climate week was a reference to the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. He might have had a chance getting the West to ante up some cash for development projects targeting climate Mitigation and Adaptation, but Loss and Damage has been and will remain, a non-starter. Asking England and the US to pay for the environmental damage of the Industrial Revolution is like Latin America asking Spain for reparations for the genocide and slavery of the Colombian Encounter, or First Nations asking for the U.S. to now kindly get out of North America, thank you very much for the iPhones. Those retreats and reparations might even be beneficial for the planet, but they aren’t likely to happen. .....



One of the ‘problems’ besetting the world at present, if the commentary in the mainstream press is anything to go by, is the existence of chronic skill shortages. Survey studies of the shifting demographics in Japan, for example, have produced ‘alarming’ results from a mainstream perspective. See for example, this OECD Report from 2021 – Changing skill needs in the Japanese labour market. I was at a meeting recently in Kyoto and it is clear that many firms in Japan are having trouble finding workers and many have even offered wage increases to lure workers to their companies. Further, many small and medium-size businesses are owned by persons who are over 70 years of age and that proportion is rising fast. The skill shortage scenario is tied in with the ageing society debate, where advanced nations are facing so-called demographic ‘time bombs’, with fewer people of working age left to produce for an increasing number of people who no longer work. The mainstream narrative paints these trends as major problems that have to be confronted by governments, and, typically, because of faulty understandings of the fiscal capacities of governments, propose deeply flawed solutions. I see these challenges in a very different light. Rather than construct the difficulties that firms might be facing attracting sufficient labour (the ‘skills shortages’ narrative), I prefer to see the situation as providing an indicator of the limits of economic activity or the space that nations have to implement a fairly immediate degrowth strategy. ......



RIP Fare:


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 [almost?] everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
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); later additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk & Charles Rixey & Aaron Kheriarty; and newest additions Meryl Nass and the awesome Radagast; and Spartacus is on substack now!!; 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 Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and... of course Heather Heying and Charles Eisenstein often bring their insight and wisdom to the topic as well... and if Heying's substack isn't enough, she joins her husband Bret Weinstein at their DarkHorse podcast ....
but, in any case, check out those sources directly as I will my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts


***** Rigger: Pharmaceutical Carnage

...... Evolution can be thought of as a kind of constrained optimization. There are many things that will impact upon ability to produce successful offspring and being the best at avoiding ‘danger’ X may actually lessen your ability to avoid ‘danger’ Y. So, some kind of bargain has to be struck. Evolution will tend to optimize the outcome across all the various ‘danger’ constraints; kind of like being a jack of all trades but master of none.

Whenever we think of some characteristic generated and honed over millions of years of evolution, we might be tempted to ask “why didn’t evolution make that characteristic a bit better?”. Probably because doing so would cause some weakness in another area that would cause a deviation from the position of overall optimization.

Evolution has generated for us a marvellous and adaptive immune system. It’s a result of millions of years of challenge from all sorts of threats and the complex system that results represents an ‘optimization’, or a near-optimization. But, like most things in evolution, it will be based on a set of judicious trade-offs that give an overall optimization, rather than just optimization with respect to any one specific threat.

Take just one component of our immune defences: antibodies. We don’t continue to produce antibodies after the disease threat has passed; the antibody level wanes. Keeping a continually high level of antibodies against antigen X is costly in terms of resources and so the solution generated by evolution is to produce mechanisms that ‘remember’ the threat, so that if it arises again the antibodies can be quickly re-made.

We fuck about with the methods provided by evolution at our peril. 

..................... Is it any wonder, then, that the mRNA gloop, hastily cobbled together for covid, has been such a monstrous fuck-up?

I’ve talked about evolution as an optimization mechanism, but perhaps it’s worth sparing a thought about how a pharmaceutical company manages the issue of constrained optimization. What are they trying to optimize and under what constraints?

They’re, obviously, trying to optimize their profit. What are the constraints here? Well, that’s not so clear. They’re clearly not optimizing under the constraint of producing an overall morbidity that is at least no worse than the placebo group.

When you don’t optimize properly with respect to sensible constraints you end up with the kind of pharmaceutical carnage we’re seeing with the covid ‘vaccines’.


All COVID-19 Vaccine Studies Used nonQ-RT-PCR to determine case status. All of the estimates of outcome are unreliable. This is the most important study we will ever likely publish in our journal.

.... Specifically, the high false positive rate (42%) of the use of nonQ-RT-PCR means

1. For every 5 true positives, 400 people without SARS-CoV-2 infection or residual fragments will be reported. ...

4. The number of "cases" via positive PCR has been overstated by a factor of 80:1. ...

6. This 80:1 bias is true in any clinical trial or any study that used arbitrarily high Ct values, INCLUDING THE VACCINE STUDIES.

As a direct result of this fatal flaw, combined with CDC’s gaff “PCR+ = COVID-19"?

There are no credible COVID-19 vaccine trial data. ....


The Early Estimates of the Fatality Rate Were Very Wrong



Pushback Fare:

Let’s not declare a pandemic amnesty. Let’s declare a real pandemic inquiry.

I’ll admit, I nearly spit out my coffee when I saw Brown Professor Emily Oster’s new headline in The Atlantic this morning. It’s the headline we’ve been waiting to see—and, in the revisionist, gaslighting style that’s become the journalistic norm on the response to Covid—it’s about the closest thing to an outright admission of guilt that we’ve seen since Covid began

The article is about as pathetically transparent as it is self-serving. Gee, I wonder what Oster did and said during Covid for which she might want amnesty…

Oh…

There’s a lot wrong here. First, no, you don’t get to advocate policies that do extraordinary harm to others, against their wishes, then say “We didn’t know any better at the time!” Ignorance doesn’t work as an excuse when the policies involved abrogating your fellow citizens’ rights under an indefinite state of emergency, while censoring and canceling those who weren’t as ignorant. The inevitable result would be a society in which ignorance and obedience to the opinion of the mob would be the only safe position.

Second, “amnesty,” being an act of forgiveness for past offenses, first requires an apology or act of repentance on the part of those who committed the offense. Not only has no such act of repentance been forthcoming, but in most cases, establishment voices like Oster’s have yet to stop advocating these same policies, much less admit they were wrong. ......



..... 
...... these precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
The thing is, Emily Oster, that we did know. We’ve studied respiratory virus transmission for years. All the virologists and epidemiologists who aren’t total morons knew your 2020 mask routine was crazy and they just didn’t care. They wanted you to do it anyway, because they thought that if they got you to act paranoid and antisocial enough, your insane behaviour might have some limited effect on case curves. Joke’s on you, and it’s sad you still haven’t realised.


el gato malo: emily oster's no good, really bad, terrible idea

brown university econ professor emily oster is out with a new missive in the atlantic (where else?) and it seems to be generating quite a lot of heat.

perhaps this is because it is so seemingly self-serving and tone deaf.

after all, this is quite the spicy take from the woman who did so much to gather so much useful data on masking in schools only to disavow the obvious conclusions it led to because the orthodoxy of those around her at brown U would not allow "masks don't work to stop covid" to be reported. ......

..... ignorance of the law is not excuse. neither is ignorance of ethics or epidemiology.

......... as an economist, surely ms oster must understand incentives. if there is no cost to having acted poorly, rashly, and without consideration or information despite the ill effects it had on others, are we not just subsidizing more such antisocial activity in the future?

i get to run amok, wreck your life, then call "olly olly oxen free" and skate on blame?

sorry about your biz, your kids, the vilification, and the dodgy jabs?

collateral damage...

what kind of system is that?

it's literally calibrated to maximize misbehavior. .....


Tweets:

Implicit in the left’s ask for “Pandemic Amnesty” is an admission that their policies were very wrong and very harmful.
Otherwise no amnesty would be needed


...


Anecdotal Fare:

Yesterday I was wondering when the vaccine zealots who demonized us would apologize. Kudos to Tim Robbins for having the gravitas to take the lead on this important issue.




COVID Conspiracy Fare:

An Analysis of the Origins of the COVID19 Pandemic: Interim Report

Those who have been attending or listening to my recent talks and podcasts may have noticed that I have repeatedly stated that my opinion is that SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and somehow entered the general population approximately September 2019. Based on their report, this now appears to also be the interim minority opinion of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions Minority Oversight Staff ......


***** Radagast: The Banality of Evil

I’ll be honest with you. I’m a broken traumatized man. The reason for that is pretty simple, I drank too much from the cup of knowledge. Once you realize what took place in early 2020, once it really dawns on you what these people did, the metaphysical ugliness of what they have done, then you get into a really dark place.




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


I think it’s good to show this again to remind people of some of the historical context of the current proxy war between Russia and the US/NATO in Ukraine. The first portion of the video is of Putin discussing his concerns at the 2016 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum to a group of western journalists about the placing of anti-ballistic missiles in Romania (and later Poland) as a result of the US having pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, and the national security threat this poses to Russia and why. The last portion is a clip from Putin’s famous 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he touched on this same emerging problem.



Other Geopolitical Fare:


Lula da Silva’s victory in Brazil’s presidential election is a blow to the Trudeau government’s Latin America strategy. It is a further rejection of Ottawa’s effort to eliminate leftist governments in the hemisphere and exposes their complicity in the 2016 parliamentary coup.

Political developments in the region have turned sharply against Ottawa recently. The elections of Gustavo Petro, Xiomara Castro, Gabriel Boric, Pedro Castillo, Néstor Kirchner and Andrés Manuel López Obrador have ushered in a new “pink tide” in the hemisphere. It has rekindled regional integration efforts, which are a blow to Trudeau’s Latin America strategy.

The Liberals multifaceted bid to overthrow Venezuela’s government has failed with even Washington looking set to jettison Juan Guaido. A more circumspect regime change effort in Nicaragua has also floundered. In Bolivia the October 2019 Canadian-backed coup against Evo Morales was decisively rejected a year later when Morales’ former finance minister, Luis Acre, won the presidency and his party took a large majority in the legislature.

A similar dynamic has taken place in Brazil. While Lula’s victory is less decisive and Canada’s role in the Workers Party’s downfall far less significant, the geopolitical ramifications of the reversal are far greater. ....




Haitians are saying "no to armed invasion from the international community, because every time there is the so-called 'help' invasion... it results in chaos," said one activist.

........ Madame Boukman, a prominent Haitian political commentator, recently tweeted that “U.S.-style ‘humanitarian’ intervention is like a massive blow to the spine.”

“It has completely paralyzed Haiti’s development,” she added. “Haitians call for a localized, Haitian solution based on the principles of self-determination.” 



Orwellian Fare:


We have been discussing the rising support for censorship on the left in the last few years. Silencing opposing views has become an article of faith for many on the left, including leading Democratic leaders from President Joe Biden to former President Barack Obama. What is most distressing is how many journalists and writers have joined the call for censorship. However, even with this growing movement, the letter of hundreds of “literary figures” this week to Penguin Random House is chilling. The editors and writers call on the company to rescind a book deal with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett because they disagree with her judicial philosophy. After all, why burn books when you can effectivelyban them?

The public letter entitled “We Dissent” makes the usual absurd protestation that, just because we are seeking to ban books of those with opposing views, we still “care deeply about freedom of speech.” They simply justify their anti-free speech position by insisting that any harm “in the form of censorship” is less than “the form of assault on inalienable human rights” in opposing abortion or other constitutional rights.





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


............ “Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, three-quarters (75%) now hold a negative view of China, and 87% a negative view of Russia,” the report reads. “However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world, the picture is reversed. In these societies, 70% feel positively towards China, and 66% positively towards Russia.”

.......... may also be partly explained by another thought-provoking Arnaud Bertrand thread, which I will quote
It’s actually quite sad, really speaks to the levels of intellectual decrepitude in the West today. The time of the Enlightenment, the big revolutions is well and truly gone. We’re stuck with our mediocre operators.

It’s also why this is such a dangerous time. A positive vision brings confidence, it brings hope, it motivates, it makes people look forward to what’s to come. The West has none of that today.

The future is scary, the dominant feelings are fear and anger.
.... Indeed, we could be striving toward a positive vision for the future, one which seeks “common prosperity” and “improved international relations,” one which works to remedy inequality and address the looming environmental crisis. Instead the world is being bifurcated, split in two, which history tells us is probably an indication that something extremely terrible is on the horizon for our species unless we drastically change course.



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

The battle over parental rights has one common denominator



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

The Study of the Week should reset our prior beliefs about the success of healthcare interventions

................. When you go to the doctor and undergo a test or procedure, or take a new medication, most of us expect that there’s darn good support for it.

This paper suggests that it’s not true.

When I started practice, this data would have surprised me. But as I’ve gathered experience in both practice and in the review of medical evidence, I am no longer surprised.

Everyone is far too confident. .........

Healthcare is hard. The human body is complex. Most stuff doesn’t work.

Patients and doctors alike would do better to be far more skeptical. Not cynical, just skeptical.

This would lead us to want stronger evidence for our interventions—especially when there is harm or high cost involved.

Then we would be less likely to adopt therapies that don’t work, or worse, harm people we are supposed to help.



QOTW:

Yarvin: Twitter is discourse. Discourse is not truth. Discourse is the raw material of truth. Discourse is to truth as coca leaf is to cocaine. Sure it can make a Peruvian peasant work all day in the sun at 10,000 feet. But no one ever did a line of minced coca leaf. You gotta refine that shit. Yet without the leaf—there is no powder.

Aronoff: "Lula winning may well be better news for the climate than anything that’ll happen at COP 27"



Satirical, or Not, Fare:









Pics:




Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, October 29, 2022

2022-10-29

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


Economic and Market Fare:

***** Roberts: The inflation conundrum

........... Also, there appears to be no inverse correlation between changes in wages, prices and unemployment.  The classic Phillips curve that claimed such a relation has shown to be false.  Indeed, this was found out in the late 1970s when unemployment and prices rose together.  And the latest empirical estimates on the Phillips curve show it to be broadly flat – in other words there is no correlation between wages, prices and unemployment.

............. So why do economists and central bankers continue to peddle a theory that has no empirical support?  Gavin Davies, a Keynesian and former chief economist at Goldman Sachs, explained: “without the Phillips Curve, the whole complicated paraphernalia that underpins central bank policy suddenly looks very shaky. For this reason, the Phillips Curve will not be abandoned lightly by policy makers”.

When theories are incorrect, the policies that flow from them won’t work.  Macro management of the capitalist economy, either based on monetarist theory or Keynesian fiscal fine-tuning, has failed to avoid or ameliorate booms and slumps in capitalist production. 

....... As Richon says: “Belief in fine-tuning and the existence of a natural rate of interest often leads central banks to increase interest rates repeatedly until they engineer a recession, which then slows economic activity, raises unemployment, and inflation finally collapses. This perfectly illustrates the asymmetric power of central banks and monetary policy: lowering rates may have no impact on launching investment (you can bring a horse to water but you can’t force it to drink), but can certainly do considerable damage, if central banks stubbornly raise interest rates high enough: this is akin to using a sledgehammer to kill a fly: you will kill the fly, but also the table on which it was resting. This is precisely what Keynes had in mind when he stated that fine-tuning “belongs to the species of remedy which cures the disease by killing the patient” (Keynes 1936, p. 323). And yet, macro management of fiscal and monetary policy is the reason for the existence of inflation targets for central banks and deficit and debt targets for governments.

So what does cause inflation rates to accelerate or disinflate?  The mainstream does not know.  The post-Keynesians turn to profit mark-ups. “From the viewpoint of the post-Keynesian theory of distribution, the functional redistributional effect of changes in interest rates centres directly on the responsiveness of the mark-up to interest rates … [which] will presumably depend both on the magnitude and expected permanence of interest rate changes.” Richon. So it’s the ability of (monopoly) corporations to mark up prices and engage in price gouging that causes inflation.

It’s true that profit rises have made the largest contribution to price rises in the post-pandemic period. ..........



Measures of global central-bank tightness and inflation show that both are peaking.

It might not seem like it after today’s upside surprises in European inflation data, but global inflation is probably in the process of peaking. The pandemic led to an unprecedented synchronised supply and demand shock, with inflation rising everywhere. However, a synchronised shock is also likely to lead to a synchronised cooling -- we seem to be on the cusp of this now.

The Global CPI Diffusion Index captures the percentage of countries around the world where inflation is in an uptrend. This index is at its maximum, a level it has only reached twice before, in 1974 and 2008. On both occasions it rapidly fell after reaching this level, with Global CPI (the median year-on-year CPI of countries around the world) following suit.


......... Even if this is peak global inflation, though, that doesn’t mean it’s beaten, nor that we won’t see another peak in global hawkishness.

Countries are likely to be battling elevated inflation for years; this will be a long game. Financial assets will struggle, and sustainable real returns will continue to be elusive until inflation is returned to a low and stable regime.


Americans' Savings Rate Plunges Near Record Lows As Inflation Overwhelms Income Growth



Throughout the year, surging interest rates, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, soaring energy costs, inflation running at the highest levels in 40 years, and the extraction of liquidity from stocks and bonds whipsawed markets violently. Since 1980, bonds have been the defacto hedge against risk. However, in 2022, bonds have suffered the worst drawdown in over 100 years, with a 60/40 stock and bond portfolio returning a horrifying -34.4%


for MK:



Quotes of the Week:

Charts: 
1:




(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The climate crisis may explain fights as disappearing ice fuels interspecies competition—with goats nearly always winning.



Other Fare:

The world’s leading literary agent speaks about Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, Donald Trump and the e-commerce giant



Pics/Vids of the Week:





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Krishnamurti: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”


Regular [Everyday Life] Fare:

Aaron Good on American exception, empire, and 'the deep state.'

.......... The extracts that follow are two. In the first, Good investigates the fateful combination of America’s constant and continuing imperial foreign policies, the decline of American democracy, and the extraordinary spread of official lawlessness abroad and at home. “Why this? How are these phenomena related?” are the questions Good addresses as, to our minds, no one else has.

In the second passage below, Good proposes a reformulated idea of a tripartite American state. There is the public aspect—the part we are meant to see. There is also the secretive, authoritarian national security state created at the dawn of the Cold War, and there is the deep state, whose power rose in tandem with the postwar empire. This last represents oligarchy, in general terms. It is comprised of all of those institutions that collectively allow for top-down rule in a nominal democracy. It is the part that is hidden “and can’t be talked about,” as Good put it in a recent conversation. .......

.......... Given this history, it is not difficult to grasp why so much of U.S. foreign policy has consisted of intervening to make countries as suitable as possible for the maximization of corporate profit. The previous seven decades provide innumerable examples that demonstrate the extent to which overt and covert U.S. interventions in foreign countries were often instigated by—and for the benefit of—the overworld of corporate wealth. These interventions have involved every expedient manner of violence and lawbreaking. It bears repeating: Foreign wars and covert operations are illegal under the U.N. Charter. Having ratified the treaty, U.S. officials violate the U.S. Constitution by contravening the charter which is deemed to be “the supreme law of the land.” .......

The rise of the tripartite state has greatly weakened American democracy in the most fundamental sense if a system of governance is understood to be more or less democratic to the extent that sovereignty rests with the public rather than elites. The decline of U.S. democracy has given rise to three crises to which the deep state system cannot adequately respond. The first crisis is the ever-present risk of nuclear omnicide—the extinction of humanity, by humanity. The second is the crisis of global climate change. The third is the crisis of inequality wherein a tiny minority owns most of the world’s wealth while globally tens of thousands of people die daily from lack of adequate access to food, potable water, and/or basic healthcare. Without drastic moves toward progressive and democratic structural reform, it is difficult to imagine how any (much less, all) of these crises can be resolved. With these sobering exigencies in mind, the theory of the tripartite state seeks to illuminate our current political dystopia and to place it in the appropriate historical context ….

Max Weber’s classic definition of the state maintains that it is the organization which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within a particular territory. Charles Tilly demonstrated that in the history of the rise of the modern state, the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence is complicated by the fact that the organizations from which the modern state evolved resembled nothing so much as protection rackets. It was through war-making that these protection-racketeering, nascent states evolved. “War made the state, and the state made war,” wrote Tilly. Thusly, the modern state emerged from institutionalized illegitimate violence, and in such a way as to allow societies to more effectively organize violence internally and externally against other societies.  .....



........... In a free media environment, the report would have triggered serious reflection on whether the Iraq war really was, in fact, about oil, as honest commentators have long claimed, albeit at the margins of ‘respectable’ discourse. What does it say about Western ‘civilisation’ and its ‘rules-based order’ that UK and US oil companies like BP and Exxon have been able to profit from the vast crimes of their governments in Iraq? And what does it say that they’re able to do so without any state-corporate journalists noticing any controversy, or feeling any need to comment at all? .....


The global food system urgently needs an overhaul to allow diverse crops, producers and supply routes



......... So the infallible representative of God on earth, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, now puts all his trust in the Guardians of inclusive capitalism, as there are, for example, the top executives of Mastercard, Visa, Allianz, Salesforce, Dupont, Merck & Co, Johnson & Johnson, Estée Lauder, BP, Saudi Aramco, Rockefeller Foundation, Bank of America. .....

Unfounded trust
Factual reasons for the pope’s newfound confidence in the goodness of the masters of money is hard to find – quite the contrary. One only has to look at the Guardians or members of the steering committee of the Council, and one sees into abysses of what corporate managers will do to maximize profits.

There’s the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson. The company has entered into a settlement with victims for knowingly selling baby powder contaminated with cancer-causing asbestos for decades, but is threatend with more law suits. In response, management intends to use a questionable trick to limit payments, spinning off the troubled activity into a new company, which would file for bankruptcy. ......

....... Pope Francis could well have guessed that the capitalist would have a different Idea of a transcendent vision of the person from his own. After all, Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, that is, the representative of the interests of all the stewards in the Council of Capitalists, is a staunch advocate of the optimization of man through his fusion with machines and artificial intelligence, including the linking of the brain to computers. In the past, people would have said that the pope made a pact with the devil.

No one should be under the illusion that Klaus Schwab is just indulging his whim and that this has no meaning. Intensive work is being done on this program. To give just two examples of many: A research institute located at the Canadian Ministry of Labor, which is interspersed with top-class sophomores of the World Economic Forum, is working on this horror scenario of “biological-digital convergence,” on computer-controlled man-machines or machine-humans ...


includes good short video:
What do Bob Saget, Taylor Hawkins, Hank Aaron, Ray Liotta, Coolio and Queen Elizabeth all have in common? They'll all vote Democratic on Election Day.
Just like the Republicans back in the Nineties (and beyond), the Democrats today CAN'T win elections honestly—because they're pushing an agenda that repels most voters. What, then, must we do?



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

A look at 10 of the most interesting reports & events of the past few weeks






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 [almost?] everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
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, and, most recently, the awesome Radagast; 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); later additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk & Charles Rixey & Aaron Kheriarty; and newest additions Meryl Nass; and Spartacus is on substack now!!; 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 Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and... of course Heather Heying and Charles Eisenstein often bring their insight and wisdom to the topic as well... and if Heying's substack isn't enough, she joins her husband Bret Weinstein at their DarkHorse podcast ....
but, in any case, check out those sources directly as I will my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts


********** Radagast: The global descent into dementia

...... When it comes to the question of why humans age, a part of the answer seems to lie in the cocktail of different viruses we’re exposed to over a lifetime, including those that we never manage to eliminate. And so the unfortunate thing I have to mention, is that living in an era where we now have a fifth human coronavirus, one that damages our T-cells, infects our neurons and reinfects us about twice a year, you have to consider the possibility that we’re now all aging faster. Studies find our organs are aging 3-4 years faster with every infection.

And so in light of that fact I wish to ask again: What are the long term implications of this mass vaccination program? I think we can all agree the vaccines helped buy us about half a year in 2021 without any significant COVID burden, at the cost of severe adverse effects. But what are the long term implications for the population, when a nineteen year old gets three shots of a vaccine, that fixates his immune response on a version of the virus that was already extinct by the time he got his third shot? And what happens when every other nineteen year old in his country also got those three shots?

The reason I’m asking is because this is the data we have right now:


And for every age group you look at, the result looks the same. Not vaccinated is tied with last dose <3 months and everyone else shows higher positivity rates than not vaccinated. This result has also been constant for months now. Vaccinating everyone once every three months is not very sustainable, so these results are very ugly.

And there’s also the ugly fact that the states with the lowest vaccination rates show the lowest positivity rate: .....

..... I don’t dispute that antibody dependent enhancement is happening. Rather, I think it mainly takes on a form that people don’t really pay attention to: Uptake of viral particles by white blood cells through complement and the Fcr receptor. If you are suffering constant damage to your white blood cells, your immune system can fall apart without you noticing. 
The T-cells continue to recognize the Spike protein, so there is no acute respiratory distress syndrome due to an over-exuberant pro-inflammatory cytokine feedback loop, but such silent damage to our immune system is equally disastrous.

The challenge we’re faced with is to reconcile all the various lines of evidence that we have available, to understand the picture that it forms: ......

The picture you get when you connect all of these dots just isn’t looking very pretty.

Society as a whole is drifting towards a kind of synthesis: Nobody really argues for lockdowns anymore and nobody really wants to forcibly vaccinate us anymore. Those people are quietly embarrassed. Simultaneously, there are very few of us “antivaxxer right-wing populist conspiracy theorists” left who would honestly insist this virus is a nothingburger. Take a look at this to see what I mean: ......

And for what it’s worth, if the Fauci’s and Andersen’s of this world had honestly announced on day 1 that they believe a genetically engineered SARS virus has escaped from a lab in Wuhan, chances are the whole subject would have ended up less politicized and everyone would have sought to work together to suppress this virus.

If you tell people they have to stay in their homes because there are too many elderly getting sick as this year’s flu strain is unusually severe, then they’re not going to work along with you. The reason elites faced such massive opposition from the working class is because they made it look like they’re changing the social contract because they cut funding for hospitals and now found themselves unable to deal with a severe flu season. And the reason it looked like that, is because they lied about what had actually happened: One of their stupid experiments blew up in their face.

I have no desire to be forever vengeful towards one demographic or another. I really just have a very simple autistic desire to understand what is unfolding around me. And what I see suggests to me that we’re in big trouble: We’re all being continually reinfected with a virus that damages our brains, blood vessels and our immune systems. ........

In people who were infected but not hospitalized by this virus, IQ drops by about 0.2 standard deviation units. The standard deviation for IQ is 15 points, so 0.2 standard deviation units would be 3 IQ points. If this effect is the same for every individual infection, that means for two infections a year, your IQ would drop by 6 points.

“Maybe it’s just correlation instead of causation, maybe dumb people are more likely to get infected.” 

I don’t believe this to be a likely explanation and I will list some evidence to show you why: ......

All I do know is this: Whatever genius high tech solution you come up with in an effort to protect people from this virus, it would have enjoyed more public support if the Fauci’s and Andersen’s of this world had honestly revealed to the population on day 1 that a dangerous man-made virus has escaped from a Chinese lab. The cover-up of what happened is the unforgivable sin that led to the mess we are in today. 

The only way out that I see is for the population to build up the sort of diverse layered immunity we have against other respiratory viruses. If we play our cards right, I expect it should be possible for people to repair the damage they incur after infections. For example, although I am a couch potato who has probably had a bunch of infections by now, my VO2 max within a month of heading back to the gym is now above average for my age.

Similarly, I think that brain damage and blood vessel damage can be addressed as well. Until that happens, until we seriously look for ways to repair the damage, I expect we’re stuck accumulating progressively more severe brain and immune system damage, gradually declining into dementia, until we lose all sense of, time, space, identity and individuality.


(Absence of) Myocarditis "Surveilance" During Moderna Shot Trial for Babies

 ...... As Joseph Lapado, Florida Surgeon General, rightfully points out in his tweet:
Curious why this isn’t getting more attention… According to Moderna themselves: “serious adverse events” affected 1 in 200 toddlers. But they still concluded the mRNA vaccine was “safe in children.”
... How do they know it’s safe? Because they made sure they weren’t looking. For example:
No deaths or cases of myocarditis or pericarditis or MIS-C occurred before the data-cutoff date. (The median duration of follow-up after the second injection was 71 days in the 2-to-5-year-old cohort and 68 days in the 6-to-23-month-old cohort).
How do they know?
Surveillance for symptoms of myocarditis or pericarditis was conducted during safety telephone calls.
Any troponin tests??? “Nah... We can’t afford them.”

So, to make it clear, the jabbed babies are getting (at least some) heart damage from year 1 of their lives, as the Swiss study has unequivocally shown. While no one is willing to look into it. And then “Doctors Are Permanently "Baffled"“ by sudden deaths in otherwise healthy youths.



CO-VIDs of the Week:




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:

“IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE” TO USE NUKES IN UKRAINE

Putin in his nearly four-hour long annual Valdai Discussion Club speech (which included a the lengthy Q&A portion) “appeared relaxed”, Reuters observed while at times questioned by journalists and panelists about the prospect of nuclear war. 

Importantly, he rejected head-on the allegations from the West that he ever so much as hinted at plans to deploy nukes in Ukraine, describing a nuclear strike in the context of the “special operation” to be ultimately pointless. “We see no need for that,” Putin said. “There is no point in that, neither political, nor military.” He underscored, “it doesn’t make sense for us to do it.

He went on to emphasize that Russia had “never said anything proactively about the possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia.” At the same time he lashed out at Washington, for being the “only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state” – in reference to WWII and the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He specifically referenced prior statements of Liz Truss and vague references to his saying he’s willing to defend Russia “by all means available” as having been intentionally misinterpreted and distorted:
Putin said an earlier warning of his readiness to use “all means available to protect Russia” didn’t amount to nuclear saber-rattling but was merely a response to Western statements about their possible use of nuclear weapons.

He particularly mentioned Liz Truss saying in August that she would be ready to use nuclear weapons if she became Britain’s prime minister, a remark which he said worried the Kremlin.

“What were we supposed to think?” Putin said. “We saw that as a coordinated position, an attempt to blackmail us.”
Literally as Putin was speaking, the Pentagon decided it was a good time to unveil a stunning nuclear strategy reversal, saying it would no longer rule out use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear threat.  ....



Other Geopolitical Fare:


In an all-encompassing address to the plenary session of the 19th annual meeting of the Valdai Club, President Putin delivered no less than a devastating, multi-layered critique of unipolarity.

From Shakespeare to the assassination of Gen Soleimani; from musings on spirituality to the structure of the UN; from Eurasia as the cradle of human civilization to the interconnection of BRI, SCO and the INSTC; from nuclear dangers to that peripheral peninsula of Eurasia “blinded by the idea that Europeans are better than others”, the address painted a Brueghel-esque canvas of the “historical milestone” facing us, in the middle of “the most dangerous decade since the end of WWII.” ....

Way beyond a catchy slogan about the game the West is playing, “bloody, dangerous and dirty”, the address and Putin’s interventions at the subsequent Q&A should be analyzed as a coherent vision of past, present and future. Here we offer just a few of the highlights: ....

“Russia has not and does not consider itself an enemy of the West.

Russia tried to build relations with the West and NATO – to live together in peace and harmony. Their response to all cooperation was simply ‘no’.”

“We do not need a nuclear strike on Ukraine, there is no point – neither political nor military.”

“In part” the situation between Russia and Ukraine can be considered a civil war: “When creating Ukraine, the Bolsheviks endowed it with primordially Russian territories – they gave it all of Little Russia, the entire Black Sea region, the entire Donbass. Ukraine evolved as an artificial state.”

“Ukrainians and Russians are one people – this is a historical fact. Ukraine has evolved as an artificial state. The only country that can guarantee its sovereignty is the country which created it – Russia.”

“The unipolar world is coming to an end. The West is incapable of single-handedly ruling the world. The world stands at a historical milestone ahead of the most dangerous and important decade since World War II.”

“Humanity has two options – either we continue accumulating the burden of problems that is certain to crush all of us, or we can work together to find solutions.” 

What do we do after the orgy?

Amidst a series of absorbing discussions, the heart of the matter at Valdai is its 2022 report, “A World Without Superpowers”.

The report’s central thesis – eminently correct – is that “the United States and its allies, in fact, no longer enjoy the status of dominant superpower, but the global infrastructure that serves it is still in place.” ........

Putin alluded to it several times in his address. There’s no evidence whatsoever the Empire and its vassals will be deviating from their normative, imposed, value-laden unilateralism.

As for world politics beginning to “rapidly return to a state of anarchy built on force”, that’s self-evident: only the Empire of Chaos wants to impose anarchy, as it completely ran out of geopolitical and geoeconomic tools to control rebel nations, apart from the sanctions tsunami.

So the report is correct when it identifies that the childish neo-Hegelian “end of history” wet dream in the end hit the wall of History: we’re back to the pattern of large scale conflicts between centers of power.

And it’s also a fact that “simply changing the ‘operator’ as it happened in earlier centuries” (as in the US taking over from Britain) “just won’t work.”

China might harbor a desire to become the new sheriff, but the Beijing leadership definitely is not interested. And even if that happened the Hegemon would fiercely prevented it, as “the entire system” remains “under its control (primarily finance and the economy).”

So the only way out, once again, is multipolarity – which the report characterizes, rather vaguely, as “a world without superpowers”, still in need of “a system of self-regulation, which implies much greater freedom of action and responsibility for such actions.”

Stranger things have happened in History. As it stands, we are plunged deep into the maelstrom of complete collapse. Putin in fact did nail where we are: on the edge of a Revolution.



The world is entering a decade of tumult as the pursuit of a more just world order clashes with the arbitrary hegemony of the collective West, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, addressing the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club. Putin’s speech ranged from biodiversity to “cancel culture,” the nature of what the West has to offer and Russia’s response, followed by hours of answering audience questions. Here are six key points from his opening remarks.

The West stokes conflict to preserve hegemony 
From inciting conflict in Ukraine and provocations around Taiwan to destabilizing the world food and energy markets, the US and its allies have been escalating tensions around the globe in recent years and especially in recent months, Putin said. “Ruling the world is what the so-called West has staked in this game, which is certainly dangerous, bloody and – I would say – dirty. It denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and disregards any interests of other states,” the Russian president explained. In their so-called “rules-based world order,” only those making the “rules” have any agency, while everyone else must simply obey. However, the West has “no constructive ideas and positive development, they simply have nothing to offer the world except the preservation of their dominance.”

Rules for thee but not for me 
The West insists its culture and worldview should be universal, Putin said. While not saying it outright, they behave as if these values must be unconditionally accepted by everyone else. Yet when some other countries, notably China, began benefiting from globalization, the West “immediately changed or completely canceled” many of the rules it long insisted were set in stone and sacred, Putin said, with free trade, economic openness, fair competition and even property rights “suddenly forgotten at once, completely.” “As soon as something becomes profitable for themselves, they change the rules immediately, on the go, in the course of the game.”

“Cancel culture” and canceling culture 
Believing themselves infallible, the rulers of the West desire to destroy – or “cancel” – those they dislike. Where Nazis burned books, the Western “guardians of liberalism and progress” now ban Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky, Putin said. Liberal democracy has transformed into something unrecognizable, declaring any alternative viewpoint as propaganda or a threat, he added. The so-called “cancel culture” destroys anything that is alive and creative, preventing any freedom of thought in culture, economics or politics alike. “History, of course, will put everything in its place,” Putin said, adding that the the self-conceit of those who seek to cancel them is off the charts, “but no one will even remember their names in a few years, while Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky and Pushkin will endure.”

Russia does not seek domination
Russia is an “independent, original civilization” and “has never considered itself an enemy of the West,” Putin said. Since antiquity, it has had ties with the West of traditional Christian and Muslim values, freedom, patriotism, and a rich culture. There is another West, however – “an aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonialist, acting as a tool of neoliberal elites,” Putin said, “whose dictates Russia will never accept.” Even so, Russia is not throwing a gauntlet to the elites of that West, but “simply defends its right to exist and develop freely. At the same time, we ourselves are not seeking to become some kind of new hegemon,” Putin said.

Western hegemony is ending
“We are standing at a historic milestone, ahead of what is probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time important decade since the end of World War II. The West is not able to single-handedly manage humanity, but is desperately trying to do it, and most of the peoples of the world no longer want to put up with it,” Putin said. Conflicts arising from this tumult are threatening the entire humanity, and constructively resolving them is the principal challenge ahead, according to the Russian leader. No one can sit out the coming storm, which has acquired a global character, Putin said. Humanity has two choices, “either to continue to accumulate a burden of problems that will inevitably crush us all, or to try together to find solutions, albeit imperfect, but working, capable of making our world safer and more stable.”



Gilbert Doctorow holds a doctorate in history from Columbia University. In this interview, the academician, established in Belgium, reveals the true face of American and European political leaders whom he describes as « cowards », « corrupt » and « incompetent ». He dissects the war in Ukraine, explains the interference of the United States in the affairs of third countries, including Algeria, gives the causes of the servility of the European Union towards Washington and points out the « massive and omnipresent » self-censorship which makes the Western press « docile ».

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: What is your analysis of the conflict in Ukraine?

Dr. Gilbert Doctorow: The conflict in Ukraine exists at two dimensions: First, there is the civil war in Ukraine that broke out shortly after the February 2014 coup d’Etat in Kiev when the government of violent nationalists whom the Americans installed set about their program of crushing Russian speakers and Russian culture on the territory of Ukraine, that is to say half or more of the overall population of the country. Resistance to this government arose immediately and spontaneously in the Crimea, where the population was overwhelmingly Russian and where Russia’s most important naval base on the Black Sea was located. The approximately 18,000 Russian soldiers who were present on the peninsula under state-to-state agreements supported the local rebellion and neutralized a Ukrainian force of similar size, preparing the way for a referendum in Crimea that voted for integration into the Russian Federation. Meanwhile, in the two neighboring Ukrainian provinces (oblasts) of Donbas, Donetsk and Lugansk, an armed insurgency also quickly developed in the spring and early summer of 2014. This led to a bloody ‘counter-terrorism’ operation by the Kiev government and its neo-Nazi battalions which was stopped only when Russia intervened. The opposing forces eventually established a cease-fire that was recognized by Kiev, by the leaders of the rebellious provinces and by France and Germany under the terms of what became known as the Minsk Accords.  These Accords were supposed to prepare the way for changes to the Ukrainian constitution that would give extensive autonomy to the local governments in the two provinces while keeping Ukraine intact.  However, over the course of the next 8 years to 2022, Kiev did nothing to implement the Minsk Accords and instead waged a war of attrition against the two provinces, with daily shelling of the civilian population that brought about 13,000 deaths in the given period.  With the help of NATO, during these 8 years, the Kiev regime reformed and strengthened its army, created a vast fortified zone on its side of the line of demarcation and prepared to attack the two provinces and end the stand-off by what would have been a bloody exercise in ethnic cleansing.  In anticipation of this attack, which could spill over into a threat to Russian Crimea, on 24 February Russia invaded Ukraine and the ‘special military operation’ to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine has been going on ever since.

The second dimension of the conflict is the confrontation between Russia and US-led NATO over the possible accession of Ukraine into NATO and over the creation of an existential threat to Russian national security through installation of cruise and hypersonic missiles there with only 5 – 7 minutes flying time to Moscow.  In the autumn of 2021 and right up to the start of the Russian invasion, Russia had been in intense discussion with Washington and Brussels over its demand that they desist from plans to bring Ukraine into NATO and from their ongoing operations to turn Ukraine into a platform for attacking Russia with or without its formally being a NATO member. The Russians in effect demanded that NATO draw back its troops and materiel to where they had been before NATO’s expansion eastward into the former Warsaw Bloc states in 1997. The Russians presented drafts of the agreements they sought to sign with the Americans and with NATO, establishing a basis for redesigning European security to bring in Russia out of the cold.

When Washington refused to negotiate these security issues, Moscow put into action its plan to get its way by force of arms, on the ground in Ukraine.  In this way, the ‘special military operation’ has escalated steadily into a proxy war between Moscow and Washington and is now approaching very dangerous risk of getting out of control and becoming a full-blown World War III, meaning nuclear Armageddon. 

How do you explain the docility and servility of European leaders towards the US? Doesn’t the fact that most of these leaders are Young Global Leaders explain the fact that they put the interests of the United States ahead of those of their own people?

Yes, for decades the leaders of the 27 member states of the European Union have largely been willing servants of Washington at the expense of the interests of their own peoples. ........


Why a Soviet submarine officer might be “the most important person in modern history.”


Reading Brazil’s first round election results

Earlier this month, Brazilians went to the polls in an election billed as the most momentous since democratization in 1985. Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro faced off against former two-term president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Though Lula did win the first-round election by more than 5 percentage points, or 6 million votes, it was not enough to clear the 50 percent threshold needed for first-round victory. The opponents will face a polarizing run-off on October 30.

..... The results from Brazil’s first round show a sharp turn to the right in the legislature—for which there are no run-offs—as well as in gubernatorial races. ...



Orwellian Fare:


.... Because no one ever thought that Musk would turn his corporatist bribes, I mean Tesla shares, into weapons of mass formation psychosis destruction. Really? No one could see this coming? Then again this is the same media that can’t see anything that isn’t scrolling up the teleprompter.

Lastly, he called everyone’s bluff and just said, “Screw it, it’s just money.” And he’s more right than you can ever really imagine. Because the rise and fall of Woke Twitter is a harbinger of things to come now that Outside Money is getting its revenge against the depredations of Inside Money. ........

What the credit bubble giveth on the way up — empowering billionaire Satanists to providing welfare jobs to harpy millennial chicks and the soyboys who simp for them — taketh away twice as fast on the way down.

What was that about Elon top-ticking Tesla again for FU Money?

I have to believe that part of Musk’s decision to finally just buy Twitter despite the fictitious valuation (and userbase) was the grief he got publicly for going against the war orthodoxy of the collective West (and specifically Davos’ enforcement of a single point of view) over, of all things, using Twitter to engage in discussion about what the outcome in Ukraine should look like.

I guess advocating for peace and to stop angry Slavs from murdering each other is no longer a core “European value.”

Actually, now that I type that out, it never was. .............



Other Quotes:

Dr John: Most of what we seem to know these  days comes to us from distant sources, intermediated through electronic channels of communication, which are owned by humans with certain "interests" in profiting from, and controlling, the flows of information in those channels. This may be direct, through advertising, or it may be covert, through CIA-funding, like Operation-Mockingbird, or influence peddling to the government, covert censorship and control-narrative management, like Facebook/Meta has done, and Google does invisibly with search rankings.



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


........... If you claim you are objecting to the US using proxy warfare in Ukraine on anti-war grounds, you are lying; you are not anti-war. You are only anti-war if you support the same positions on Ukraine as noted anti-war activists John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo. If you want to learn about the true anti-war position, consult reliable anti-war publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The official narrative on Ukraine is that the US empire and its media never lie or circulate propaganda about wars that the US is involved in. If you dispute this, you are lying and circulating propaganda. That’s why it’s necessary to have so much censorship and organized trolling and mass media reports reminding you how good and righteous this war is: it’s to protect you from lies and propaganda.



Mainstream punditry in the latter half of 2022 is rife with op-eds arguing that the US needs to vastly increase military spending because a world war is about to erupt, and they always frame it as though this would be something that happens to the US, as though its own actions would have nothing to do with it. As though it would not be the direct result of the US-centralized empire continually accelerating towards that horrific event while refusing every possible diplomatic off-ramp due to its inability to relinquish its goal of total unipolar planetary domination.

The latest example of this trend is an article titled “Could America Win a New World War? — What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia” published by Foreign Affairs, a magazine that is owned and operated by the supremely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations.

“The United States and its allies must plan for how to simultaneously win wars in Asia and Europe, as unpalatable as the prospect may seem,” .......

....... 
These Beltway swamp monster pontifications are directed not just at the general public but at government policymakers and strategists as well, and it should disturb us all that their audiences are being encouraged to view a global conflict of unspeakable horror like it’s some kind of natural disaster that people don’t have any control over.

Every measure should be taken to avoid a world war in the nuclear age. ....



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