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Friday, October 21, 2022

2020-10-21

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Experts say raising rates ‘isn’t working’ and that the real culprits are corporate pricing, energy costs and supply chain

.......... Skyrocketing demand for durable goods coupled with supply chain problems has created “enormous pricing power” for companies that had stock on hand, Bivens said. Typically corporations attempt to widen margins by suppressing wages, but that changed during the Covid recovery, he added.

The situation is ever-evolving. Wages are falling, which should mean people are buying less and eroding corporations’ pricing power, Bivens said, and some supply chain issues are resolving themselves – the cost of some shipping containers is down by 64% from the same week last year.

The producer price index, which tracks business inputs cost, showed deflation in July and August. It increased by 0.4% in September, but with food and energy excluded, it remained flat. .....


A discussion on supply chains, commodities, and climate

..... This roundtable discussion—“The Geopolitics of Stuff”—featured Kate Mackenzie, Tim Sahay, Joe Weisenthal, Thea Riofrancos, and Skanda Amarnath. Experts in subject matter ranging from price controls to metals mining to markets, the panelists explored recent policy moves towards more direct management of the economy: bans, nationalizations, rationing, windfall taxes, and price controls. Where are these measures well-designed? When are they counterproductive? Read an edited transcript below, and watch a recording of the event here.


Market strategist and historian Russell Napier warns of a 15- to 20-year phase of structurally elevated inflation and financial repression. He shares his views on how investors should prepare for this new world.

Russell Napier has never been one of the eternal inflation warners. On the contrary: The market strategist and historian, who experienced the Asian Financial Crisis 25 years ago at first hand at the brokerage house CLSA in Hong Kong, wrote for years about the deflationary power of the globalised world economy.

Two years ago, the tide turned and Napier warned of a vicious return of inflation – and he hit the mark. In an in-depth conversation with The Market NZZ, which was lightly edited for clarity, he explains why most developed economies are undergoing a fundamental shift and why the system most investors have become accustomed to over the past 40 years is no longer valid.

.... This is structural in nature, not cyclical. We are experiencing a fundamental shift in the inner workings of most Western economies. In the past four decades, we have become used to the idea that our economies are guided by free markets. But we are in the process of moving to a system where a large part of the allocation of resources is not left to markets anymore. Mind you, I’m not talking about a command economy or about Marxism, but about an economy where the government plays a significant role in the allocation of capital. The French would call this system «dirigiste». This is nothing new, as it was the system that prevailed from 1939 to 1979. We have just forgotten how it works, because most economists are trained in free market economics, not in history. .........

.......... So that’s why we’re in for a long social and political journey. What you have learned in market economics in the past forty years will be useless in the new world. For the next twenty years, you need to get familiar with the concepts of political economy.



.... The world has changed right before our eyes. It has been one of my favored rhetorical questions for the past couple decades: Is “money” (monetary inflation) the solution or the problem? The answer is obvious – has been for some time, and I’ll assume central bankers have accepted the harsh reality.

Years of unprecedented monetary inflation created false realities. The perception of endless cheap (free) “money” distorted how our market, economic, financial, political and social systems function. The long-overdue adjustment period has commenced, and there’s every reason to expect it to be especially brutal. So quickly, so many things are different. There were this week more tremors and that nagging feeling the ground was about to give way.

I feel for Liz Truss. She could very well be the shortest-serving Prime Minister in UK history. Central bankers and bond markets have merrily accommodated many a crazy budget. Now they’re running scared, leaving stunned politicians to try to figure out what can work in today’s new reality.

In a microcosm of unfolding global phenomena, the UK faces dual fiscal and monetary policy crises of confidence. And to this point in the UK, uncompromising markets want nothing to do with additional fiscal spending and monetary stimulus.

... Prime Minister Truss and BOE Governor Bailey could commiserate over a cup of English breakfast tea. Truss is forced to placate the bond market, while trying to avoid the appearance of a wimpy pushover quickly caving on her government’s entire fiscal agenda. It’s messy U-turns and the short-timer look of indecision.

Bailey must prevent bond market and pension system breakdowns, while not completely opening the monetary floodgates with inflation raging and the pound fragile. The BOE’s emergency bond support was to expire Friday, though few believe that’s doable. Most remain convinced that central banks are forever subjugated to “whatever it takes” market crash protection. For the BOE, it’s messy U-turns and the unsettling look of indecision. Credibility hanging in the – it’s dangling.

......... Few seem to appreciate the irony of Bernanke receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics just as central bank inflationist doctrine faces a monumental crisis of confidence. He won his Nobel Prize for his research on bank runs. No one has done more to ensure a run on global market instruments.

..... Ben Bernanke, “On Milton Friedman’s Ninetieth Birthday,” November 8, 2002 ....
Bernanke concluded his 2002 speech: “Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

He went and did it, with Dr. Bernanke the (now wealthier) standard-bearer of history’s most disastrously flawed economic ideology.



The history of finance, is basically the history of ruined speculators claiming that “no one could have seen that coming.”

To be successful at this game, one must focus on the unexpected—the tail risks that no one is even thinking about. However, in the echo-chamber that is modern finance, these tails often get dismissed or even worse, ignored.

No where is this tail risk more apparent than in analyzing the Fed. For the past four decades, the Fed has repeatedly over-tightened, broken something and then panic-eased while drenching everything in liquidity. This naturally leads to another bubble that overcomes the smoldering debris of last cycle’s bubble. For most of us in finance, this has been our “circle of monetary life.” There’s a reason that so many investors live by the simple adage, “don’t fight the Fed.”

............. Thinking back to every other US financial crisis, the long end has rallied aggressively as inflation collapsed and investors reached for yield, fearing for the great deflation that never seemed to show up. What if this time is different?? What if investors rightfully say, “who the hell wants 30 years of inflation risk when the CPI has an 8-handle, and the Fed is pausing with a 4-handle??” What if the only reason that the long end hasn’t detonated yet, is the Pavlovian memory amongst traders to buy duration into a financial crisis?? What if investors buying the long end, expect the Fed to over-tighten and detonate the economy, yet fail to appreciate that inflation may not slow?? What if we have an economic crisis but inflation is suddenly accelerating?? What if the real crisis isn’t caused by the Fed tightening, but the Fed not tightening enough??

..... What if I pile into risk assets, just in time for the real crash?? If you aren’t considering this outcome and terrified that it is a real possibility, you aren’t paying enough attention. .......



The British government has descended into high farce. It is rather embarassing to watch adults behave in the way they have conducted themselves in the last longtime. I also note that the usual suspects are out in force claiming (spuriously) that the economic turmoil that has beset Britain demonstrates categorically that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is deeply flawed and the real world is now teaching us that we should be discarded into the dustbin of history – or rather disgrace. These characters, which include so-called progressives think that hard core fiscal rules, like the British Labour Party took into the last election would have saved the day for Britain. I guess they are now mates with the IMF, who in their latest fiscal monitor – Fiscal Monitor – overnight (published October 12, 2022) – called for fiscal restraint. Also, central bankers who met in Washington over the last few days decided they had become the elected and accountable government making gratuitous threats that if fiscal policy wasn’t turned to austerity, they would punish citizens with further interest rate hikes. It is actually hard to find anything of sense in the current economic debate. It is despairing really. ....





....... Notably, given that “good employees” are hard to find, expensive to train, and challenging to replace, companies tend to be “slow to hire and slow to fire.” As such, they start with essential cost-cutting and then proceed to cuts in capital expenditures (CapEx.) According to the NFIB survey data, the current level of CapEx spending is associated with previous recessions.

Once corporations reach the limits of cost-cutting, terminations eventually follow. As shown, CEO confidence at such low levels coincided with low jobless claims. Notably, jobless claims do not trend higher; they spike as terminations come rapidly. ....




Used-Car Prices Record Largest YoY Decline Since Financial Crisis










It is hard to find a single inflation indicator not rolling over, but there is ONE and that will be tricky to handle for the Fed. Meanwhile, European energy supplies are MUCH better than feared!


Temporary forces that pushed annualized inflation into the double-digits are going into reverse. The remainder is being determined (mostly) by the pace of wage growth and persistently high margins.

... As I have explained at length in previous notes, most of the unwanted price increases we have experienced since the start of the pandemic can be explained by idiosyncratic factors. Those forces made inflation worse than what might reasonably have been expected based on fundamental domestic economic conditions. Nominal national income in 2022Q2 was less than 5% higher than what might have been expected based on the 2018-2019 trend, yet the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was 8% higher.

The good news is that the impact of those disruptions should fade as businesses adjust and society normalizes. In fact, this already seems to be happening. Input prices for manufactured goods are starting to fall while the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s index of “global supply chain pressures” has been plunging since the peak reached at the end of 2021.




..... It’s all quite reflexive and low rates are what’s stopping the snowball from rolling down the hill. Raising rates will set an avalanche in motion. When your debt to GDP exceeds 100%, your ability to maneuver is restricted. The US is on the precipice of an Emerging Markets debt crisis and Powell seems determined to be the one who sets it all in motion, but only after he first blows up every other global Central Bank.

I am always reminded that the Fed is full of useless academics, but in the end, it’s a highly political institution and they’ll craft the white papers to justify whatever idiotic course they choose to take. As the above scenario begins to unfold, the political class will force Powell to back down. They will decide that increased inflation is preferable to detonating the treasury. The Pause is coming and it will send equities parabolic. There will be a few more nasty moments between then and today. The trick is to survive and then max it out when the Fed admits that they’re trapped. It’s going to be one of the great wealth transfers of all time. Who’s ready?



.... The Fed's mantra last year was "lower for longer". This year their mantra is "higher for longer". Because what could go wrong.

When the year started, there were 0% odds of recession and four rate hikes projected for ALL of 2022. Now, the odds of recession are 100% and the Fed's terminal rate is projected to be 5% by early 2023.

... Anecdotally, I would say that half of today's pundits believe the Fed should keep tightening and the other half say the Fed is making a colossal error by over-tightening. So it can come as no surprise that mass confusion reigns supreme. 

For it's part, the bond market is agreeing the Fed is making a historically massive error. Inflation expectations as imputed from Treasury Inflation Protected (TIP) bonds are LOWER than they were in 2007 and 2000.  ...



Quotes of the Week:

Grannis: As I've argued in recent posts, there's plenty of evidence to suggest the Fed has already tightened by enough to bring inflation down: the dollar is super-strong, real yields have risen sharply, the yield curve is inverted, commodity prices are plunging, and the housing market has run into a brick wall. Yet the Fed seems determined to tighten even more. I think they're driving by looking into the rear-view mirror. They're trying to burnish their reputation as an inflation fighter, after having fallen miserably behind the inflation curve in 2020 and 2021. And I think that the long-discredited Phillips Curve (which posits that unemployment must rise if inflation is to fall) still haunts the Fed governors' minds. It's all so unfortunate.


Lepard: “Within 3 years a lot of our debt rolls. We’re at $1.2 trillion more in interest owned annually than we were. They need to issue bonds to finance that. You can’t sell more bonds in a market where yields are spiking. It’s a doom loop,”


...

...



Vids of the Week:

********** Adam Taggart interview with Dylan Grice: Rising Interest Rates To "Break Something", But Also To Result In Good Values
Cdn housing mkt gets a brief but special mention at the 18min mark  and then in more detail at 30min

plus, Pomboy:



Charts: 
6:
7:



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Bubble Fare:

********** Hussman: Estimating Downside Market Risk

At the beginning of 2022, our most reliable stock market valuation measures stood at record levels, beyond even their 1929 and 2000 extremes. The 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.5%, the 30-year Treasury bond yield was at 1.9%, and Treasury bill yields were just 0.06%. By our estimates, that combination produced the most negative expected return for a conventional passive investment portfolio in U.S. history. Year-to-date through October 14, 2022, the S&P 500 has lost -23.9% including dividends, 10-year Treasury bonds have lost -18.1%, and 30-year Treasury bonds have lost -33.8%.

For any given set of future cash flows, the lower the price an investor pays today, the higher the returns the investor will enjoy in the future.  The good news is that the declines in stock and bond prices this year have increased the long-term returns investors can expect. The bad news is that the good news is likely to get better.

At present, investors in Treasury bonds can at least look forward to earning an average of 4.02% annually over a 10-year horizon, and 3.99% annually over a 30-year horizon. Likewise, year-to-date stock market losses have been sufficient to bring our estimates of 10-12 year S&P 500 total returns from the most negative levels in history to – well, about zero. It’s a start.

Generally speaking, rich valuations are associated with weak subsequent market returns, while depressed valuations are associated with strong subsequent market returns. The chart below illustrates this relationship, showing our most reliable measure: nonfinancial market capitalization to gross value-added, including estimated foreign revenues (MarketCap/GVA), versus actual subsequent 12-year S&P 500 nominal total returns, in data since 1928.


......... The prospects for S&P 500 total returns have certainly improved since the beginning of the year, but they are still far from adequate. There are only two ways to make them adequate: either prices must decline further, or prices must stagnate for more than a decade while fundamentals catch up. My impression is that we’re likely to see a combination of both, resulting in what I’ve often called a “long, interesting trip to nowhere.” This outcome would mirror what investors experienced during 1929-1947, 1966-1985, and 2000-2013. In each case, the S&P 500 lagged Treasury bills for more than a decade. That’s 50 years out of 84. Starting valuations matter. ..........

By our estimates, the Fed has created government liabilities for which it no longer has offsetting assets, which means that the Fed has quietly gone insolvent – not that anyone cares given that this insolvency is opaque. Moreover, having forced the public to choke down trillions of dollars in base money – mostly held indirectly as bank deposits – the Fed can’t even conduct monetary policy without paying interest to banks on those reserves (otherwise, yield-seeking by banks would drive rates below the Fed’s targets). Leave aside the question of whether creating government liabilities without Congressional appropriation is even Constitutional. The fact is that the Fed can’t simply “print money” to make itself whole .........

The “completion” of a market cycle involves the repricing of valuations from rich or extreme levels that imply poor or dismal long-term expected returns – to run-of-the-mill or depressed lows that imply reasonable or outstanding long-term returns. In my view, the market losses that we have observed during 2022 to-date represent what Robert Rhea described in 1932 as the “first principal phase” of such a retreat – “the abandonment of hopes upon which stocks were priced at inflated prices” – in this case, the abandonment of the notion that the Federal Reserve could forever hold interest rates at zero without consequence. We have not yet observed “selling due to decreased business and earnings,” much less “distress selling of sound securities, regardless of their value.” ..........

The chart below provides some insight into the market loss we estimate would be required to restore even run-of-the-mill historical valuation norms. The blue line in the chart below is based on MarketCap/GVA (see the scatterplot near the top of this comment), showing the market loss necessary to bring expected S&P 500 returns to the higher of a) the 10% long-term historical norm, or; b) a 2% risk-premium over-and-above Treasury bond yields. The red shaded area shows the deepest actual loss of the S&P 500 over the subsequent 30-month period – that shading stops 30 months ago since we don’t yet know the deepest loss for more recent periods.

Notice that the 2000-2002 market loss did not quite restore historical valuation norms. Of course, the S&P 500 also posted a negative total return between its October 2002 low and its March 2009 low. Investors can run from overvaluation – defying it with speculation for extended periods of time – but ultimately, they can’t hide.

You’ll also notice that there’s often quite a bit of white space before the blue troughs become full of red ink. Those white spaces represent potential risk that has not yet been realized. Speculators have certainly enjoyed a great deal of white space in recent years. But it’s exactly that long period of speculation without consequences that makes potential market losses so deep. 



........ We can’t rule out any action by the Fed, but from the standpoint of historical and even recent Fed behavior, the current Fed Funds rate is not even close to the level at which a pivot to lower rates would be minimally reasonable. That will change as the data for inflation and unemployment change. These measures are really what investors should attend to, if they are interested in being realistic. .....

Still, given that current, observable economic conditions are historically consistent with a 10-year Treasury bond yield of at least 5.3%, the potential for continued upward yield pressure shouldn’t be ruled out. ....



.... Holter explains, “For sure, we are already in a recession.  We are now in the third quarter of negative growth.  I think it is laughable that people  put odds on whether or not we are going to go into a recession because it is obvious–we are already in a recession..."

"...  Rates rising have absolutely frozen the real estate market.  If you own a property, who is going to buy it?  Rates have gone from 3.25% to more than 7%.  I am on the record that once we saw a 3% yield on the 10-Year Treasury, you would start to see a tightness in credit.  Now, we are over 4%.  What few people are talking about is what has this already done to the derivatives market?

...Think about how big the derivatives market is.  Total credit worldwide is $350 trillion, but you have derivatives pushing $2 quadrillion.  I have said this all along, derivatives will blow up.  Warren Buffett has called them financial weapons of mass destruction.  They are far bigger than central banks can fix.”

Holter goes on to say, “The real economy runs on credit.  Everything you look at, everything you touch and everything you do every day has many uses of credit to get to the final product or situation..."

"  So, once credit freezes up, it’s completely game over.  In a past interview, I said they are pulling the plug.  They have to pull the plug because, mathematically, the debt cannot be paid.  The derivatives cannot perform.  So, they have to pull the plug.  They also have to do one other thing, and that is they have to kick the table over.  What will the false flag event be?  I have no idea...

They have to kick the table over so they can say our policies were working, but whatever this event will be stopped them.”



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The case adds to a growing number of major climate accountability cases against the oil industry, a scenario that Shell predicted in 1998.


Warmer air is thinning most of the vast mountain range’s glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain so much ice. The melting could have far-reaching consequences for flood risk and for water security for a billion people who rely on meltwater for their survival.



Other Fare:



Neil Gaiman on Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Why We Read, and How Speculative Storytelling Enlarges Our Humanity



Pics of the Week:

“Stuff your eyes with wonder… live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”




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:




Unsustainability 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




...... If you wonder why everything is going to shit right now, why we’re stuck in this stupid war with Russia, why the global economy is collapsing, why every business is desperately trying to hire new employees, this is why. Cognitive capacity is being lost around the world. Upon being infected you start suffering brain inflammation which lasts for months, your own brain becomes collateral damage in the attempt to fight off this virus. Most of the decay happens long after your flu symptoms stop.

There can be recovery, the inflammation can decline once the immune system has gotten rid of all viral matter, which then allows the nervous system to repair itself, but I wouldn’t count on it if you’re constantly being reinfected, like most of the population in highly vaccinated Western nations is, as you can see here ...

This is what we call vaccine failure: The lows keep getting higher. Will it ever revisit the September nadir? Probably not, as there are now numerous simultaneously circulating variants, affecting different tissues in the body, with ever higher ACE2 affinity, recalling poorly neutralizing antibodies.

Eventually even unvaccinated countries are probably going to get hit again, as immunity wanes, children grow up and the variants born in Western nations hit the developing world. The only way this mess can come to an end (if it ever will) is when the whole population has diversified immunity against Spike epitopes associated with virulence, which would then give a fitness advantage to more benign variants that don’t trigger an aggressive antibody response. The vaccines merely massively delayed that process. 

There is stuff you can do to repair the damage. Psychedelics help reduce the inflammation, fibrinolytics reduce the fibrosis. But by the time someone is visibly dumber, there has already been a lot of damage, just as in Alzheimer’s, where you only notice the first symptoms of the disease once a lot of damage has already occurred. My advice is: Reduce inflammation, break down the fibrin that’s building up in your blood vessels and give your brain the tools it needs to repair itself. Otherwise you will end up losing your mind.



ACT test scores have dropped to a new low in the US. These are tests high school students take before going to college. Check the scores yourself here. The decline is visible in basically every demographic. Scores went down from 20.7 in 2019, to 20.6 in 2020, to 20.3 in 2021, now to 19.8 in 2022. I’m asking you: At what point do you stop pretending this is due to a few weeks of school closure and start realizing the whole population is suffering some subtle brain damage?

Can we please start acknowledging that there is a genuine problem? Or is this going to be like climate change, where Europe gets its worst drought in 500 years, the koala’s in Australia are pushed towards extinction by the forest fires, the Siberian landscape has gaping holes where the methane is starting to blow up and its concentration in our atmosphere grows faster every year even though our own human emissions are stable, but you morons are so eager to pretend nothing bad is happening that you just refuse to see it?

As evidence that something is going wrong at a population-wide level, you can also just look at the life expectancy that is plunging: ........

Bad karma

You’re not going to believe me and that’s fine, but I have to say it. Humanity brought this virus that’s eating your brains and collapsing your global economy upon itself. Cruelty towards others, especially towards children and animals, generates bad karma. Rates of mental illness in children and teenagers are very high, which is mostly due to academic pressure. That’s the fault of adults. ....



John Beaudoin is one of the unsung heroes of the pandemic. Through a record request and a lawsuit, he obtained all the data from Massachusetts necessary to look under the hood and see clearly that the pandemic in 2020 and the pandemic in 2021-2022 look like two entirely different events. And the evidence points clearly toward the introduction of COVID-19 vaccination as the offending variable.



.... the deeply scary part here is that mRNA drugs are notorious for causing all kinds of auto-immune diseases. that and their high levels of toxicity are why none has ever been approved before the covid jabs. “too toxic to be oncology” is a strong statement. this is basically unavoidable.

these compounds penetrate cells and teach them to code for proteins that manifest on cell membranes and look like the the ones caused by the pathogen. they train your body to attack it.

but sometimes, this goes too far.

these drugs were supposed to “stay localized at injection site.” but clearly, they do not. pathology has shown them all over the body. heart, lungs, liver, ovaries, testes, pancreas etc and so the “training” to attack the surface proteins is taking place within vital organs. 

if your immune system gets too engaged, it may keep attacking even once the new proteins are gone.

no one really knows why this sometimes happens, but we know that it does. your immune system is closer to a symbiote than a body system. it lacks down-regulation safeguards and can sometimes run amok or misidentify your own tissue as foreign.

now you have an auto-immune disease.
and that’s forever.
and if this can cause diabetes, it can cause 100 others too. .......




Myocarditis in young boys
 
 
New study shows that pretty much everyone is getting heart damage from the COVID vaccines
They just aren't letting you know that. In Canada, the medical community is very smart about this: they don't let doctors measure troponin levels before you are vaccinated so nobody is the wiser.  

... In the graph shown at 6:21, we see that the 777 people who got the booster in this study have uniformly higher troponin levels than their matched unvaccinated peers. That is not supposed to happen. If the vaccines are safe, the troponin levels should be nearly identical between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups.

Here are Professor Prasad’s exact words:
It's not just the tip of the distribution that has elevated high sensitivity troponin, it's that the entire distribution is right shifted. Everybody's having a little bit of elevation in high sensitivity troponin. That's what this graph would have you infer.
You get a troponin elevation when there is damage to your heart:
Troponin is a type of protein found in the muscles of your heart. Troponin isn't normally found in the blood. When heart muscles become damaged, troponin is sent into the bloodstream. As heart damage increases, greater amounts of troponin are released in the blood
What the study shows is that nearly everyone is getting a little heart damage when they get the COVID vaccine, some get a lot more damage than others.....


Chudov: Cancer Rates are Increasing -- and May Get Much Worse
Wiped Out Immune Systems Take Time to Manifest

We have a problem: cancer deaths began to increase, off the charts, in late 2021, with cancer death incidence exceeding expected levels by a statistically “impossible” 9-sigma difference — and we are seeing only the first small ripple of a storm coming in the future.

Nobody exemplifies this wave of cancers better than the Belgian Covid vaccine advocate and misinformation fighter Michel Goldman, who developed a “rare” form of lymphoma (immune system cancer) following his Covid vaccination. His lymphoma rapidly worsened after his booster dose ...........

..... This part of the post is written by A Midwestern Doctor, whose substack I highly recommend. He explains why Covid vaccines are genotoxic, mutagenic and have other effects to increase the rare of cancers far beyond what we have experienced. ...................



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

RemnantMD: Our neurosurgeons have confirmed that we are seeing a rise in brain cancer, across all age groups.
Most strikingly, in young adults. Several staff physicians included
They have no idea why.




CO-VIDs of the Week:

********** re-upping; PLEASE PLEASE WATCH THIS:
Part 1 is Viewable for 10 days for free


also:

 

Anecdotal Fare:




Pushback Fare:



***** Kunstler: American Inquisition

....... Alas, the thinking classes across Western Civ have now gone insane. Today, they are the ones perpetrating real crimes against humanity. They have given themselves permission — as elites will — to behave cruelly, unjustly, and idiotically against the public interest and against the inherent rights of individuals to fair treatment. They’ve subjected millions to injury and death. They’ve maintained the fraudulent “Emergency Use Authorization” (EUA) for hugely profitable, ineffective, and dangerous drugs by prohibiting treatments with proven effective drugs — the use of which would nullify the EUA and the legal protections it affords the drug-makers. They’ve concealed the statistics that would show all that. And they appear to be acting with arrant malice driven by political actors offstage. 
 
Dr. Nass is demonstrating how they can be effectively opposed.
 


COVID Corporatocracy Fare:

What we know, and what we don't





The incompetent or corrupt Maine medical licensing board, in my opinion a hired shill for Big Pharma, suspended Dr. Meryl Nass, a top level expert on Corona viruses, for curing Covid patients with FDA approved HCQ and Ivermectin.  The obviously incompetent Maine licensing board regards Nass to be in violation of Fauci’s protocol which required doctors to let patients die rather than treat them with Ivermectin and HCQ.  A Maine attorney general questioned Dr. Nass and tried to create the false impression that she violated informed consent.  Dr. Nass and her lawyer would have none of his insinuations.  The attorney general’s behavior suggests to me that he also is a paid shill for Fauci and Big Pharma.  I regard his questioning as dishonest, and it suggests to me that he has no integrity.

What appears to be the process is that a hireling of Big Pharma files a complaint that a doctor, who is curing patients or providing correct information in interviews and on internet sites of how to prevent and cure Covid, is spreading misinformation. The alleged misinformation  is not specified or identified.  It is a vague undefined complaint.  Regardless, the medical licensing boards accept the hearsay complaint, convene and suspend the doctor’s medical license, thus halting the curing of patients and maximizing the Covid death rate.  This is what has been going on during the entire Covid period.  In other words, medical officials helped to maximize the death rate, thereby the fear rate, thereby the vaccination rate, thereby Big Pharma’s profit rate.  This is what the Covid pandemic is about.  What it means is that we can have ZERO CONFIDENCE IN MEDICAL OFFICIALS.

Here is a video of Dr. Nass being questioned by a Maine attorney general trying to cast aspersion on her and then by her own lawyer in order to bring out the real facts.  If the American people stand for this level of corrupt practices by medical licensing boards, the American people are dead meat.



Welcome to the New Age, where authority has no authority and does not deserve to act with any authority, but will act as if it does, anyway, and then lie to you about it. Nowhere is this quandary more vivid than in the racketeering operation formerly known as medicine.

As if there has not already been enough official fuckery over the lab-birthed Covid-19 virus, the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee voted on Thursday to add Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA shots to its childhood vaccine schedule. The vote was 15 to 0 — a final supreme gesture of contempt for the people of this land.

Had none of the committee members seen reports of mRNA-vaccinated children dropping dead from myocarditis induced by the vaccines? Or read about the effect of the vaxxes on the reproductive organs? Or the enhanced incidence of cancer? Or heard about the damage that the shots instigate in human immune systems? If not, that would be astounding. The news is all over the place (if not in the mainstream news media). Was any of this discussed in their deliberations? I don’t think so, but we may never know. 

Adding the mRNA shots to the official vaccine schedule will make permanent the liability shield their makers enjoy under the current emergency use authorization (EUA). Pfizer and Moderna are now off-the-hook for any responsibility, unless fraud over the vaxxes is proven in a court of law. Given the vast evidence of harms done by these products, will that be a difficult thing to do? ....


Just as Canada's "free press" has largely stopped reporting people "dying suddenly" (unless they're famous), Alberta's "health service" is now erasing ER records of the "vaccine"-injured



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:

Western leaders hopefully have “enough intelligence” to avoid a direct military confrontation with Russia, Vladimir Putin said




The resurgence of armed Palestinian confrontation with Israeli colonial authorities has been years in the making, and Israel has launched a months-long military campaign to wipe it out.


...


Other Geopolitical Fare:


.................... There it is in black and white. The US is going to do whatever it takes to preserve its top spot in the global order “come hell or high water.” And Bateman is right, there will undoubtedly be “even harsher U.S. measures to come, not only in advanced computing but also in other sectors (like biotech, manufacturing, and finance)” And that, of course, means more sanctions and tariffs, more disruption to vital supply-lines, and higher costs for everything. If you thought the war with Russia impacted energy prices, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” Winding back 40 years of globalization is going to be an excruciating experience tantamount to major dental surgery absent the Novocain.

............... The Biden administration is squandering American power on unilateral actions it cannot enforce and that will no have meaningful impact on China’s development. They’d be better off looking for ways to ease the transition to a new world, then pathetically trying to turn back the clock to the bygone “unipolar moment”.



Orwellian Fare:

this is a good commentary, sufficiently interesting enough to link to on its own merits, particularly the excerpt here... but it is an absolute must to click thru to read if only for the embedded MUST SEE video of lint-roller dude!
stop being enticed into playing games whose boards you will never be able to see

........ the simple fact is that the information age threatens to drown us. there is too much data of too much complexity coming at us too fast all the time. there is no way to consume or parse even a fraction.

and so, goes the logic, you have to trust someone.

but do you?

there are two options here:
  1. build webs of trust and find people who you think are at least trying to tell the truth. acknowledge that all this has limits, but use this new massive plurality of punditry and perception to find those who seem sensible. assess their track records. trust lightly, then build to more as greater trust is earned. engage also with the other side and those with whom you disagree. hear their arguments in their own words so that you can assess them and they yours. in this way, you can assess the world and try to keep the disinformation, curation, and misperception to a minimum.
  2. stop having an opinion on things. in many ways, this is the more potent solution. the great illusion of the modern age is that you must have a view on everything. you don’t. it’s totally fine to say “i have no idea whether to support or oppose this” and to do and say nothing. neutrality pending future information and assessment is a valid position. many times, you’re just not going to get enough trustworthy information to generate a sound view. if such is the case, then the only reasonable action is not to have an opinion. this need to generate one and join a tribe in the conflict is more likely to get you into trouble than out of it. and making the same mistake over and over again while expecting it to be different this time, well, we all know what that’s the definition of…
...................... US foreign policy is mr magoo with predator drones.



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


............ The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel somehow pulled off the heroic feat of getting an article advocating de-escalation published in the Washington Post with a piece titled “The Cuban missile crisis was 60 years ago, but it’s urgently relevant today.” Reminding us how close we came to total annihilation and how we only survived getting so recklessly close to nuclear war by “plain dumb luck,” she argues that humanity cannot risk going to the brink like that again.

“Humanity cannot afford to spin the cylinder again in this game of Russian roulette; we must unload the gun. Our only path forward is de-escalation,” vanden Heuvel writes.

Indeed it is. It’s absolutely insane that humanity is risking its own extinction over these games of empire-building and planetary domination when we’ve got so many other existential hurdles we need to focus on clearing. ...



We should probably talk more about the fact that the US empire is loudly promoting the goal of achieving peace in Ukraine by defeating Russia while quietly acknowledging that this goal is impossible. This is like accelerating toward a brick wall and pretending it’s an open road.

..... Wanting to weaken Russia and wanting to save lives and establish peace in Ukraine are two completely different goals, so different that in practice they wind up being largely contradictory. Drawing Moscow into a bloody quagmire means many more people dying in a war that lasts years.

The US does not want peace in Ukraine, it wants to overextend Russia, shore up military and energy dominance over Europe, expand its war machine and enrich the military-industrial complex. It’s posing as Ukraine’s savior while being clearly invested in Ukraine’s destruction.

It is not legitimate to support this proxy war without squarely addressing this massive contradiction using hard facts and robust argumentation. Nobody ever has.

❖

Westerners demand more nuanced and believable motives from their Marvel movie villains than from the propaganda narratives their media peddle about enemies of the US empire.

❖

It is always right and good to criticize the most dangerous actions of the most powerful government in the world. It is always right and good to demand the west uphold the values it claims to uphold and play by the rules it claims to play by. This is self-evident and requires no defense.

I’ve long felt like a big part of my job here is just being the voice that says “You’re not crazy. I see it too.” Assuring people they’re not going mad when it looks like everything they were told about the world is a lie and everyone they were trained to trust is deceiving them.

Because that is the message you will receive when you start asking the important questions and getting the important answers about ruling power structures in our world: people will act like you’re a raving lunatic for talking about US empire malfeasance and western propaganda. Only by mass-scale propaganda brainwashing would it ever appear insane to criticize the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth. It’s the most normal, sane and rational thing in the world, but it’s made to look freakish by narrative spin.

To paraphrase Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is no measure of health to be deemed sane in a profoundly insane society.



It’s pretty wild how the US is sending armored vehicles to Haiti to help quash the exact sort of uprising it’s been actively trying to create in places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and Hong Kong.

❖

“Maybe my government is actually in the wrong here and is just lying and manipulating to advance its own interests?” should be a much more common thought. It’s a line of inquiry that should be taught to schoolchildren. It is by design that it doesn’t occur to people more often.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
 
********** Greer: Waiting for the Fall
 
............ Go back a few more decades and you’ll find pundits insisting in smug tones that liberal democracy was superior to all other systems because it thrives on free inquiry and the clash of competing ideas.

So how did we get, in rather less than half a century, from liberal pundits preening themselves over the open society to their present-day equivalents demanding blind faith in the dogmatic utterances of officially approved experts? That’s a complex story, and we can begin it with a famous BBC documentary titled The Century of the Self, which originally aired in 2002. ....

.............. One thing that interests me is that a great many people seem to grasp this, at least on an intuitive level. The increasing contempt for government and corporate flacks and their abject dishonesties isn’t expressing itself in a rush to the barricades or the kind of violent outbursts so many people have expected. Instead, people are hunkering down, cutting their losses, ignoring the increasingly hysterical demands coming from government and corporate sources, and waiting. My guess is that they’re waiting for the fall of the current system—and it’s by no means certain that they will have to wait all that long.



........ What’s transpired in the last six years has only strengthened my conviction. How different the world could be if parasitic elites, politicians, government bureaucrats, journalists and doctors didn’t lie about the pandemic, about the virus, the vaccines, ivermectin and everything else? Or if they didn’t lie about Syria, China, Russia, Yemen, Haiti, Ukraine, about the wars, about bridges and pipelines…

I know, fat chance. But we should not feel that we’re doomed: many will lie, but some do tell the truth. Our burden should be to be discerning, to seek out truth, call out the liars and support the truth tellers. We don’t need to lament that truth isn’t spoon-fed to us – we must simply exert ourselves, claim it and defend it.


Rigger-ous Fare:
 
You're Being Conditioned

I have to say, my brain is slowly turning to some gloopy mess after trying to navigate a week’s worth of “news” and opinion. Not to mention my spirit. There was a time when the world seemed to make some sort of sense to me.

I think one of the reasons I have focused on gender ideology over the past months is not so much that it is important (which it obviously is) but that it is an example of something that is stark raving bonkers. How did we ever manage to talk ourselves into the position that in order to become, one merely has to identify? And that’s only one of the deranged dogmas that have been voided from the bowels of the all-consuming gender ideology behemoth.

Compassion and kindness is one thing, living in some weird sexualised (and genderised) fantasy world that bears only a superficial resemblance to reality, quite another.

But nutters have always been with us. What’s interesting about the gender ideology stuff is how many ordinary non-nutty people seem to have swallowed it.

Today I want to try to simmer down a bit and get a bit technical. I feel like I need some kind of anchoring in sanity and rationality before attempting to sally forth onto the hellish woke battlefield once again.

This morning I’ve seen a couple of tweets stating things like “half of my 14-year-old granddaughter’s class identify as trans”, or that “half of my daughter’s class are LGBTQ+”

My immediate thought, beyond social contagion, is what’s the probability of that?

Probability is a fundamental part of our lives and a fundamental part of how we view the world. We’re conditioned to think in terms of risk, for example. The risk of nuclear war, the risk of climate change, the risk of covid, the risk of not vaccinating or wearing a mask, the risk of suicide if gender-affirming care is not available, and so on.

Everywhere, we’re invited to frame things in terms of risk. Warning; there be dragons ahead.

What we’re all pretty hopeless at, unless we put in some effort, is putting this risk landscape into perspective. It’s hard not to be swayed by a headline that says “eating bacon doubles your risk of a heart attack”. Eating bacon becomes a risky business - at least in our minds. Our subconscious will have got the message; bacon = bad.

Evolution has tried to give us a balance somewhere in between being paralyzed by fear and being wholly unconcerned with risk at all. Neither of these extremes would have been a great survival strategy. But, alas, it has also left us vulnerable to manipulation and this has been exploited by politicians and tyrants throughout history. Just two examples; Hitler stoked up fear of the Jews, Trudeau stoked up fear of the unvaccinated. There’s no essential difference in technique here. Both leaders, presumably, thought their highlighting of the ‘risk’ was appropriate and justified in some way.

So, how do we combat the current pandemic of (alleged) risk that seems to be plaguing us?

The only real way out of this is by education. To be more specific, it’s a particular kind of education. It’s the kind of education (and it could be self-education) that questions, and attempts to place everything within a rational framework. It’s a kind of day-to-day working out of the scientific method applied more generally which I state in typically Riggerian fashion

If something doesn’t fit, your ideas might be shit

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