Pages

Sunday, October 2, 2022

2022-10-02

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Coppola: What was the real reason for the Bank of England's gilt market intervention?

.... I don't think the Bank was concerned about pension funds at all. I think it had a totally different type of financial institution in its sights. 

Let's recap the sequence of events from a market perspective. ........

.... When you dig deeply enough into a financial crisis, you almost always find it's really about banks.


The Great Reset is upon us. 
All things as we have known and have become comfortably numb with, such as zero interest rates, negative real interest rates, quantitative easing (digital money printing), and Pax Americana, [and central bank dominance of the U.S. bond market] are being upended and overturned.  Beware of recency bias, folks, as the global structural shifts and changes are now ubiquitous
Here’s a quick primer that may explain the current global macro dynamic between the strong dollar and rising bond yields. We’ve been beating this drum for years. .......

Upshot
The U.S. financial markets are still flush with too much money, and the Fed has once again lost control of events. Something big will eventually break, but in the words of the great-late MIT professor Rudy Dornbush:
In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.


... Or maybe we are wrong and the Fed is finally becoming aware that it its actions are about to break the economy and market again. That's what Charlie Gasparino reported yesterady when he tweeted that, according to several big investors, "federal reserve officials getting increasingly worried about "financial stability" as opposed to inflation as higher rates begin to crush bonds." Gasparino continued that the Fed was growing "worried about possible "Lehman Moment" with a 4% FF rate as Bonds and derivatives tied to them crash, given the enormous debt issued in just the past 3 years at super low rates. A Fed watcher told me the UK intervention was not "a one off" and the same systemic risk could happen here, which might cause the Fed to pause."


Something is brewing in the financial world


The Covid Recovery Looks Different Now

The latest revisions from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) have closed most of the gap between the reported value of the goods and services produced in the United States and the income ostensibly generated in the U.S.

Before the most recent updates, Gross Domestic Income (GDI) in 2022Q2 was supposedly 4% higher than Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These two figures should be identical—if measured correctly. Subtracting depreciation made the reported gap even larger, with Net Domestic Income (NDI) 5% higher than Net Domestic Product (NDP). The good news is that, as of this writing, revisions have shrunk the “statistical discrepancy” to 1.3% of GDP and to 1.5% of NDP. After accounting for inflation, the level of GDP as of 2022Q2 has been revised up by 1.1% (NDP is unchanged), while the level of real GDI has been revised down by 1.5% (NDI is down 1.7%).

....  And productivity—real GDP per hour worked—is still falling at an unprecedented rate, which seems odd.


"Full-Fledged Ice Age": Semiconductor Companies Slash Output On Supply Glut


***** Keen: A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing
Observations on the debate between MMT advocates and Progressive Money Canada founder Jeff Eder

...... Having made this mistake myself, I came to realise that understanding double-entry bookkeeping is the "Holy Grail" to understanding money, and therefore that if someone makes claims about money that contradict double-entry bookkeeping (DEB for short), then they should be ignored, because they don't know what they are talking about.

........................... Money is the sum of the Liabilities (plus short-term Equity) of the banking sector, plus cash. Reserves are on the Asset side of the banking sector's ledger, and they can't be spent in the same way that money can. You can buy anything that is for sale with money. In contrast, there's very little that banks can do with Reserves, apart from transfer them between each other, and buy government bonds with them. Since Reserves are not money, a better term for them is "funds".

The key question is, since the Banking Sector uses Reserves to buy Government Bonds, where do they get these Reserves from—in other words, how are Reserves created? ......

... Therefore, the funds that the banks use to buy government bonds are created by the government itself. It's sheer semantics to describe this as the government borrowing from the banks, and it's a failure of intellect to treat this—as both mainstream economists and Eder do—as equivalent to the private sector's borrowing from banks. Instead, it's an asset swap: the banks swap Reserves, which (normally) earn no interest, and can't be traded, for Bonds, which do earn interest, and can be traded.

Why do both parties take part in this swap? For the banks, it's a no-brainer: you swap a non-tradeable, non-income-earning asset for a tradeable, income-earning one. Here is a simple personal analogy for this situation: ......

......... Eder's concerns about government debt, and how deficits are financed, have the same root causes as the concerns of "Deficit Hawks" and mainstream economists: a failure to understand double-entry bookkeeping, and the fundamentals of the operation of a fiat currency.





It was all the way back in May when we first warned that a reversal of the "shortage of everything" bullwhip effect was coming, as soaring inventories (the result of covid-era overordering due to snarled supply chains) are about to hit a slowing economy brick wall, and prices are about to fall off a cliff as companies are forced to liquidate said inventories into a recession ....





Quotes of the Week:

Cinnamond: We never believed the Fed could get out of the box it placed itself in after years of overly aggressive and intrusive monetary policy. Ultimately, we expect Chairman Powell will be forced to admit he doesn’t have a house in the Hamptons and will once again pull out the Fed’s worn-out playbook and abruptly shift policy. In effect, the Fed will have to admit that a hawkish monetary stance is incompatible with current debt levels and an economy overly dependent on asset inflation. At that time, we expect a growing number of investors will discover what we’ve longed believed—the Fed is trapped.
 
Malinen: I have a really bad 'deja vu', from 2008. During that summer I often worried that so many people really did not know what was about to hit. Same now. People live their lives without understanding that our (financial) world may shatter as early as next week.
 
Alert: Effective immediately, the Vatican has transferred all liquid capital assets from around the world to the IOR Vatican Bank. According to official reports, the process was completed on 09/30/22.












Charts: 
1:



...
 



Bubble Fare:


.... Chairman Powell and investors are currently on a similar ride to a nonexistent destination. Chairman Powell has turned hawkish, professing that higher rates and QT are possible after years of substantial debt growth and unprecedented asset inflation. Conditioned by 13 years of easy money and numerous QE bailouts, investors are going along for the ride, also believing the Fed can tighten without a major market dislocation. In effect, Chairman Powell and investors seem to believe at the end of their trip (tightening cycle), Powell’s legacy and investors’ capital will arrive safely at some sort of soft landing.   

In our opinion, investors believing the worst is behind them are neglecting the extraordinary heights asset prices and policy extremism reached during the current cycle. Market cycles that soar over 600% from their lows and reach valuation metrics rarely seen typically do not end with a wimpy 19% decline from all-time highs. 

.... Many of this cycle’s earnings tailwinds are in the process of being replaced with headwinds. With equity and bond prices currently down year over year, the wealth effect has turned negative. Further, without additional stimulus checks, consumers are struggling to maintain their standard of living due to declining real incomes and the accumulated loss of purchasing power. ... In our opinion, the long overdue normalization of corporate profits is currently underway. ....

.... We never believed the Fed could get out of the box it placed itself in after years of overly aggressive and intrusive monetary policy. Ultimately, we expect Chairman Powell will be forced to admit he doesn’t have a house in the Hamptons and will once again pull out the Fed’s worn-out playbook and abruptly shift policy. In effect, the Fed will have to admit that a hawkish monetary stance is incompatible with current debt levels and an economy overly dependent on asset inflation. At that time, we expect a growing number of investors will discover what we’ve longed believed—the Fed is trapped.



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


Over the last couple of weeks, I have received so many questions about what is going on with ESG. ESG is the only thing the past 100 years that has forced the financial industry to take responsibility for externalities impacted by their investment and lending decisions. So why is ESG under such assault?

The simple answer to that question is that most of what is claimed to be ESG investments and/or lending, is not really ESG and never was ESG. It was all empty promises, marketing, PR, and higher fees. It was never the intention that it should become a reality. But profitable? Oh yes.

.... A more complex answer is that ESG, when done for real, unpacks fundamental flaws in the valuation models which has been used by the financial industry over the course of history. The more precise and validated “soft” data we have, i.e. environmental and social, the easier it becomes to detect these fundamental flaws, correct them and make far better investment decisions. ........


We may already have a "miracle" fix for climate change: Electrify everything.


The “exploratory” analysis will launch in early 2023 and be separate from bank stress tests, the central bank said, adding it will not have capital or supervisory implications.







... In particular, trickle-down theory more specifically advocates for a lower tax burden on the upper end of the economic spectrum in order to boost incomes for those who will save and invest more.  That’s just talk for raising profits for business to the detriment of wages in order to encourage investment.  Increased income and profit for the rich will eventually trickle down to the rest of us when the rich spend their money or invest in their businesses.

Leading mainstream supply-side economists like Thomas Sowell reject ‘trickle down’ as part of supply-side theory or policy.  Sowell: “Let’s do something completely unexpected: Let’s stop and think. Why would anyone advocate that we “give” something to A in hopes that it would trickle down to B? Why in the world would any sane person not give it to B and cut out the middleman? But all this is moot, because there was no trickle-down theory about giving something to anybody in the first place.”

The theory is really an economic child of the extreme right-wing philosophy of Ayn Rand, the American who reckoned that the rich should rule without restriction, the gormless masses should follow them and that greed is good.  Indeed, this philosophy permeates British PM’s new economic advisors.  One such is Matthew Sinclair, formerly chief executive of the right-wing misnamed Taxpayers’ Alliance.  This is funded by unknown foreign donors. Sinclair wrote a book called Let Them Eat Carbon, arguing against action to prevent climate breakdown.  He claimed that: “Equatorial regions might suffer, but it is entirely possible that this will be balanced out by areas like Greenland.” So that’s all right then; as those in the Global North will be fine, even if billions of poor people in the Global South fry or drown.


........ Japan’s extensive bull-dozing and mass collection of contaminated topsoil and debris, poisoned by the meltdowns’ radioactive fallout, has filled approximately 20 million one-ton bags. These millions of tons of cesium-contaminated waste are standing outdoors in mountainous stacks scattered across seven states. Some of the heavy bags have been jostled and broken open by torrential rains during typhoons.

Attempts to locate and examine the total of 900 tons of melted reactor fuel (which possibly burned through the wrecked “containments” and foundations of the three units) have failed, because robotic cameras have repeatedly been destroyed by the ferociously hot and radioactive melted wastes. Eleven years after the catastrophe, the condition and location of the melted fuel masses, known as “corium,” is still uncertain because Tepco has yet to develop a robust enough camera. ......



Geopolitical Fare:


The reaction to the sabotage of three of the four Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in four places on Monday, September 26, has focused on speculations about who did it and whether NATO will make a serious attempt to discover the answer. Yet instead of panic, there has been a great sigh of diplomatic relief, even calm. Disabling these pipelines ends the uncertainty and worries on the part of US/NATO diplomats that nearly reached a crisis proportion the previous week, when large demonstrations took place in Germany calling for the sanctions to end and to commission Nord Stream 2 to resolve energy shortage.

The German public was coming to understand what it meant that their steel companies, fertilizer companies, glass companies and toilet-paper companies were shutting down. These companies were forecasting that they would have to go out of business entirely – or shift operations to the United States – if Germany did not withdraw from the trade and currency sanctions against Russia and permit gas and oil imports to resume, and presumably to fall back from their astronomical eight to tenfold increase.

Yet State Department hawk Victoria Nuland already had stated in January that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward” if Russia responded to NATO/Ukrainian accelerated military attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern oblasts. President Biden backed up U.S. insistence on February 7, promising that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. … I promise you, we will be able to do it.”

Most observers simply assumed that these statements reflected the obvious fact that German politicians were fully in the US/NATO pocket. They held fast in refusing to authorize Nord Stream 2, and Canada soon seized the Siemens dynamos needed to send gas through Nord Stream 1. That seemed to settle matters until German industry – and a rising number of voters – finally began to calculate just what blocking Russian gas would mean for Germany’s industrial firm. 

Germany’s willingness to self-impose an economic depression was wavering – although not its politicians or the EU bureaucracy. If German policymakers were to put German business interests and living standards first, NATO’s common sanctions and New Cold War front would be broken. Italy and France might follow suit. That nightmare of European diplomatic independence made it urgent to take the anti-Russian sanctions out of the hands of democratic politics and settle matters by sabotaging the two pipelines. Despite being an act of violence, it has restored calm to international diplomatic relations between U.S. and German politicians. 
 
......On Tuesday, September 27 when news of the Nord Stream gas attacks became known, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken shed crocodile tears and said that attacking Russian pipelines was “in no one’s interest.” But if that really were the case, no one would have attacked the gas lines. I have no doubt that U.S. strategists have a game plan for how to proceed from here, and to do so that indeed is in what the neocons claim to be in the U.S. interest – that of maintaining a unipolar neoliberalized and financialized global economy for as long as they can. They have long had a plan for countries that are unable to [service] their foreign debts. The IMF will lend them the money, conditional upon the debtor country raising the foreign exchange to repay the (increasingly expensive) dollar loans by privatizing what remains of their public domain, natural-resource patrimony and other assets, mainly to U.S. financial investors and their allies.

Will it work? Or will debtor countries band together and work out ways to restore the seemingly lost world of affordable oil and gas prices, fertilizer prices, grain and other food prices, and metals or raw materials supplied by Russia, China and their allied Eurasian neighbors? That is the next great worry for U.S. global strategists. It seems less easy to solve than was done by the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2. But the solution seems to be the usual U.S. approach: something military in nature, new color revolutions. The aim is to gain the same power over Global South and Eurasian countries that American diplomacy wielded over Germany and other European countries via NATO.

Unless an institutional alternative is created to the IMF, World Bank, International Court, World Trade Organization and the numerous UN agencies now biased by U.S. diplomats and their proxies, the coming decades will see the U.S. economic strategy of financial and military dominance unfold as Washington has planned. The problem is that its plans for how the Ukraine war and anti-Russian sanctions have worked out so far have been just the reverse of what was announced. That may give some hope for the world’s future. The opposition and even contempt by U.S. diplomats to other countries acting in their own economic interest and social values is so strong that they are unwilling to think through just how these countries might develop their own alternative to the U.S. world plan. The question is thus how successfully these other countries may develop their alternative new economic order, and how they can protect themselves from the fate that Europe has just imposed upon itself for the next decade......



Zan, Zendegi, Azadi: Woman! Life! Freedom! 

This is the stirring slogan of the protests that have erupted across Iran, triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old Kurdish Iranian woman who was visiting Tehran with her family when Iran’s morality police detained her on September 16 for showing too much hair under her hijab (head scarf). 

Led by predominantly young women and men in their late teens and twenties, the nonviolent protests are expressing a range of priorities. Beyond their frustrations at the indignities of being harassed and arrested for violating the Islamic dress code—not to speak of the danger of dying as Amini did—most are also expressing a desire to live under a different system of government.

I believe we are witnessing something unprecedented in Iranian history: a feminist social movement. The renewed demand for accountable government and individual freedom—the liberal democratic ideal—has sprung up from the battle over the patriarchal control of women’s bodies and the paternalistic domination of public space. 

Today’s feminist movement, women and men alike, is saying no: women will exist in public not as wards under the control of male guardians of religious law, but as equal citizens. They are demanding recognition of basic individual human dignity and liberty, such as modern individuals have come to expect. ....



Other Fare:

A bill that would allow New Yorkers to collect bounties for reporting bike-lane blockers is aimed at curtailing illegal parking. But some worry about unintended consequences. 



Pics of the Week:




Fun Fare:



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.”


Truth and Reconciliation Day Fare:

HIDDEN FROM HISTORY:
The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples by Church and State in Canada
A Summary of an Ongoing, Independent Inquiry into Canadian Native “Residential Schools” and their Legacy

By Rev. Kevin D. Annett, M.A., M.Div.

Published by The Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada, a public investigative body continuing the work of previous Tribunals into native residential schools: The Justice in the Valley Coalition’s Inquiry into Crimes Against Aboriginal People,  convened in Port Alberni, British Columbia on December 9, 1994, and The International Human Rights Association of American Minorities Tribunal into Canadian Residential Schools, held in Vancouver from June 12-14, 1998.


Regular Fare:
 
Varoufakis: Zombie capitalism is unravelling
This crisis is a symptom of a broken model that relied on ultra-low rates to compensate for anaemic growth.
 






Some nurses are so hard up that they are having to not eat at work in order to feed and clothe their children, research among hospital bosses has found. Lack of money is also prompting some NHS staff to call in sick in the days before they get paid because they can no longer afford the travel costs for their shift.
 

...Those who are invested in the idea of merit-based capitalism can justify the unimaginable wealth of the world’s richest people only by assuming they are intelligent enough to deserve it.

This is a façade. Rather than smarts, the wealthiest people on the planet appear to be rather small-minded idiot savants who share a common disdain for the rest of us.


Staying in office is clearly more important than doing the right thing and resigning.

I normally feel great sympathy for any person battling the terrible disease of dementia. However, in the case of President Biden, who the whole world knows is battling this affliction, the sentiment I feel is closer to disgust.

....... We’ve all known people who are obviously losing their mental sharpness. I know several friends who are struggling with this condition right now. (In fact, I wonder if this “brain fog,” at least in some people, might be an adverse reaction to the Covid “vaccines.”)

.... So I have no doubt President Biden knows what’s happening to him.

My main point is that any person with an iota of genuine character would acknowledge what is occurring to him, and for the good of the country he’s supposed to be leading, step aside. Absent this happening, one would hope the people who love and care about this person would persuade him to do this.

But these aren’t the type people who are “leading” our country. Instead, they are the type people who care only about their position, status and power and have no qualms whatsoever about participating in a conspiracy to cover up the truth.



Unsustainability Fare:

The Myth of Empire

..... The more complex a civilization becomes, the more difficult it is to sustain daily, in much the same way a complex animal has so many more needs compared to a monocellular organism.  A human has hundreds more ways to die compared to a bacterium.  If any one of our organs stops functioning, we quickly reach a near-death situation.  This is why when an ecosystem is under stress, it is the complex organisms and predators higher up the food chain who face the biggest long-term existential risk, have the biggest needs and are the most sensitive to perturbations.  All empires are doomed once they have reached a level of complexity that is unsustainable.  They are incredibly complex organisms.  With their delicate supply chains, political volatility, dense urban populations susceptible to pandemics, complicated food and water supplies that come from far away, civilizations are very easy to destabilize even if just one of these elements suddenly goes off the rail, as countless historical examples have demonstrated.  ......

As long as the house of cards grows taller, it doesn’t matter that it is beginning to wobble in the breeze.  It all looks good right now, right at this minute.  And then suddenly, it doesn’t. 

Denying the truth only delays and enlarges the avalanche of karma that has been accumulating high up above.  For a very brief moment the mirror breaks, and all becomes clear.  But it’s already too late.  Human civilisation is a shooting star.

Ooops. You’ve just missed it



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


It is very clear that the microvascular damage caused by the Spike Protein’s attack on the endothelium, in essence, replicates a “mild” heart attack. By virtue of its effect on the microvasculature, it also induces “liver attacks,” “brain attacks,” “kidney attacks” and so forth via the same mechanism. Also, the post-myocardial infarction damage of ischemia-reperfusion injury, additionally, occurs. ....
 
 
 
Bridle: Either COVID-19 Jab-Induced Myocarditis is 'Mild' or a Bunch of Physicians are Incompetent
Article in The Lancet: Child and Adolescent Health Suggests the Latter
 
.... The messaging in this paper follows what has become an all-too-common pattern for those still pushing the singular so-called ‘COVID-19 narrative’. In other words, it is what I like to call a ‘rhetoric sandwich’. There is some important objective data that contradict the narrative but it is downplayed amongst a presentation of the science that seems to make it almost support the narrative.
 

Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

...



CO-VIDs of the Week:



Anecdotal Fare:
 



Pushback Fare:

What If They Threw a Pandemic & Nobody Came?
Sending an SOS to the World: #StopTheTreaty

.... This is an SOS to the people of the world.

At this moment in history, a global coup is underway. It started in 2020. Really, it started long before that, but we’ll focus on 2020 onward because that’s when Mr. GloboCap; the philanthropaths; their mentors and muses; the tyrants; WEF puppets; the “experts”; government agencies; and the colluders yanked the rug out from under us and we began our dizzying tumble down the rabbit-hole of propaganda; menticide; psychological experimentation; dehumanization; disconnection; obedience training; censorship of “misinformation”; data obfuscation; gagging of doctors; smearing of scientists; bamboozlement; human rights violations; mandates; quarantining; martial law; medical apartheid; totalitarianism; concentration camps; and all ten stages of genocide via experimental injection, hospicide, and mockery of early treatment protocols.



COVID Corporatocracy Fare:
 





In the first half of this series (which must be read to fully understand this second half) I reviewed how those in power always seek to censor information for their own benefit, and how big business will always seek to take every step necessary to monopolize their markets. Much of the COVID-19 disaster is a direct result of those parties (some of whom had previously been criminally charged for antitrust violations) working diligently to monopolize the truth in the years leading up to COVID-19 and their actions have left us in a dramatically different information landscape than what we had just a few years ago.

One of the most draconian measures to come out of COVID-19 is on the verge of being signed into law, and the purpose of this article is to bring public awareness to the context behind this deceptive law. If you are in the vicinity of Sacramento today, please consider attending the rally that is being held to protest against it. ...




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so.  It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match.  The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia, the Biden administration and their media lackeys

… will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China …. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.

Many good writers – all of whom are banned from mainstream media – have  made clear why the corporate media propaganda about the US/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is false and egregiously dangerous.  The government of the U.S.A. is led by morons in the demonic grip of the “The U.S. Should Rule the World” ideology.  It is nothing new.

I don’t wish to debate the facts, for that is a fool’s game created to suggest there is something to debate.  For the evidence is clear, except to the public in the grip of propaganda-induced ignorance or those elites who never learned from the ancient Greek goddess Nemesis that dark Furies will destroy those who in their hubris push the limits.  The Biden administration has already done that, while President Biden mutters inanities as if he were a mafia boss wandering the streets in his pajamas and slippers.  The recent sabotaging of Nord Stream 2 is another example of the treacherous road we are traveling, as Diana Johnstone makes clear in her recent article, “Omerta in the Gangster War.” 

For years, the U.S.- run NATO has moved military forces and bases into countries encircling Russia. This includes weapons that can very quickly be converted to nuclear use. This, as I’ve pointed out before, is tantamount to Russia doing the same in Mexico and Canada, and let’s add Cuba as well.  We know what the U.S. response would be, but when President Putin and his government objected and said this is a betrayal of previous agreements, he was dismissed as if he were a child making things up.

In 2014, when the U.S. engineered a coup in Ukraine, bringing into power neo-Nazi elements, and Russia protested this coup on its western border, Washington mocked such concerns. Every time Russia has complained about such provocative moves, the U.S. has dismissed them as inconsequential.

For years the U.S. has supported the Ukrainian killing of the Russian speaking peoples of eastern Ukraine, and finally, when Ukraine had amassed forces to invade the Donbas region, the Russian government had had enough and sent troops into the region to defend this area.  Thus the hypocritical West played at outrage that what they had created was finally backfiring.  Russia was cast as the guilty party for invading Ukraine.  And now a full-fledged U.S. war against Russia is out in the open and it will become more dangerous as it continues.  Nuclear annihilation becomes a very real possibility as the Biden administration continues to push the envelope. 

There will be no end to the war in Ukraine because the U.S. is intent on doing everything in its power to try to bring Russia to its knees.  It is madness on its face, but then insane people are in charge. In this process, everyone is expendable, friends, foes, and anyone who stands in its way, including the U.S.’s supposed European allies whose leaders seem intent on destroying their own countries. .................


The Winter of Yuri

.. After a slow, attrititional grind for much of the summer, events have begun to accelerate, calling to mind a famous quip from Vladimir Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” ...


.... I think, however, that people lost focus as to what the referenda and the ensuing annexation means. Western talking points focused on the illegitimacy of the votes and the illegality of any annexation, but this is really not very interesting or important. The legitimacy of annexation is derived from whether or not Russian administration can succeed in these regions. Legitimacy, as such, is merely a question of efficacy of state power. Can the state protect, extract, and adjudicate?

In any case, what is far more interesting than the technicalities of the referenda is what the decision to annex these regions says about Russian intentions. Once these regions become formally annexed, they will be viewed by the Russian state as sovereign Russian territory, subject to protection with the full range of Russian capabilities, including (in the most dire and unlikely scenario) nuclear weapons. When Medvedev pointed this out, it was bizarrely spun as a “nuclear threat”, but what he was actually trying to communicate is that these four oblasts will become part of Russia’s minimum definition of state integrity - non-negotiables, in other words.

.............. The large scale view of force ratios is as follows:

Ukraine has spent much of the combat power that they accumulated with NATO help during the summer, and will have an urgent need to reduce combat intensity for refitting and rearming at precisely the same time that Russian combat power in the theater begins to surge.

Simultaneously, NATO’s ability to arm Ukraine is on the verge of exhaustion. Let’s look at this more closely. .......

Anyone who expects the war to slow down during the winter is in for a surprise. Russia is going to launch a late autumn/winter offensive and achieve significant gains. ....

... For now, though, we are in the interregnum as the last flames of Ukraine’s fighting power flickers out. Then there will be an operational pause, and then a Russian winter offensive. There will be several weeks where nothing happens, and then everything will happen.

During that operational pause, you may be tempted to ask - “is it done, Yuri?”

No, Comrade Premiere. It has only begun.



This is a reproduction of my live Twitter summary/translation of Vladimir Putin's speech:

I wish every single person in the West would listen to Putin's speech. Obviously, that won't happen so let me summarise as a professional translator for 10+ years. He states, as he has done from the outset, what his intentions and complaints are in the plainest terms possible.

Setting aside his brief comments on the recent "referendums", he spends most of his speech discussing the West. His primary complaint isn't NATO expansion, which gets only a cursory mention. The West is greedy and seeks to enslave and colonise other nations, like Russia.

The West uses the power of finance and technology to enforce its will on other nations. To collect what he calls the "hegemon's tax". To this end the West destabilises countries, creates terrorist enclaves and most of all seeks to deprive other countries of sovereignty. ......

The rules-based order the West goes on about is "nonsense". Who made these rules? ....

The US rules the world by the power of the fist. Any country which seeks to challenge Western hegemony becomes an enemy. Their neocolonialism is cloaked in lies like "containment" of Russia, China and Iran. The concept of truth has been destroyed with fakes and extreme propaganda (irony game still strong).

You cannot feed your people with printed dollars and social media. You need food and energy. But Western elites have no desire to find a solution to the food and energy crises *they* (emphasis his) created. ......
 

.... After all, this madness is being pursued in the name of abstract policy norms—the rule of law and sanctity of borders—that make Washington a laughing stock. More than any other nation on planet earth (and by a long-shot), it has serially and blatantly violated these standards scores of times in recent decades.

Among other actions, Washington’s interventions in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia etc were not only pointless; they were also a self-evident violation of the very rule of law and sanctity of borders upon which Washington now beats its breasts ever more stridently.

Moreover, by wallowing in this unhinged hypocrisy Washington has abandoned every semblance of commonsense as to why this conflict happened in the first place and why it is wholly irrelevant to the national security of the American homeland, or, for that matter, Europe, as well.

The fundamental fact is, aside from the historically short interval of iron-fisted communist rule during the Soviet era, Ukraine had never been a nation-state within its post-1991 happenstance borders. In fact, for upwards of 275 years before 1918 much of its territories were borderlands, vassals and outright provinces of Czarist Russia; and before that constituents of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire and others.

So we are not dealing with the invasion of a long-established, ethnically and linguistically coherent state by its aggressive neighbor, but with the left-over potpourri of separate tongues, territories. economies and histories that were smashed together by brutal communist rulers between 1918 and 1991.

Accordingly, the fast-approaching dark, cold winter of stagflationary collapse in Europe is not being done in heroic defense of the grand principles proffered by Washington and NATO. To the contrary, it amounts to the pointless and grubby business of preserving a vile status quo ante that was confected on the lands north of the Black Sea, not by the ordinary course of historical evolution and nation-state accretion, but by the bloody-hands of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.

In any event, the staggering economic costs for the everyday peoples of Europe in pursuit of such a threadbare and illegitimate purpose is starting to register among the long-suffering victims of Brussels’ elitist rulers. Hence the thunderbolts from the Italian elections this weekend and Viktor Orbán’s parallel appeal to the European Union to lift sanctions and thereby potentially reduce energy prices by half in one swell swoop.

Nor is Orbán the only one calling for an end to sanctions ...



Other Geopolitical Fare:


.... As Pepe Escobar eloquently put it in his essay “Requiem for an Empire: A Prequel,” the days of clueless cold warriors dreaming of a Germany-Japan axis, and Washington’s opportunity to erect itself as Supreme World Paradigm saviour of the “free world,” or the unilateral 1990s basking in the tawdry “end of history” celebrations while “toxic neocons, gestated in the inter-war period via the gnostic cabal of New York Trotskyism, plotted their power takeover.”

Escobar rightly assesses that “today, it is…the specter of a Russia-China-Germany entente that terrorizes the Hegemon as the Eurasian trio capable of sending American global domination to the dustbin of History.”
 
 
Soldo: Saturday Commentary and Review #99

Despite the Americans putting their European “allies” on their knees thanks to coercing them to sanction Russia and in the process destroy their own economies, there is a play happening just to the side of the main stage in that a bifurcation is taking place between the two.

As the Anglosphere continues its march towards a paradoxical authoritarian liberal utopia, the European continent keeps inching rightwards, evidenced by the strong showings of both the Swedish Democrats and the Brothers of Italy in recent elections in both of those countries. Europe’s shift to the right has mass; even though much of it can be chalked up to a protest vote, these parties have shown that they have staying power, and aren’t just temporary distractions. As they dig themselves into the corridors of power on the national stage, they will in time be able to challenge the liberal behemoth that dominates Brussels (but not just yet, of course).

The most important ingredient in this lurch to the right on the continent is the dissatisfaction with mass migration. The unwillingness of the centre, the liberals, and the left to listen to the people on this subject is what fuels the rise of the populist right. It’s just that simple. Yet they do not listen, because they are right and the people are wrong.


Soldo: David Frum: Still a Bum
Nothing has changed as a sh*thead remains a sh*thead and is proud of it

I knew that the fix was in only hours after the finger was pointed at Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida for conducting the terrorist attacks on 9/11. One of the big network TV news programs (I forget which) brought out some neo-conservative to explain to us that Saddam Hussein had a role in these attacks too, and that he should be forcefully removed from power. Was it Krauthammer? Perle? Kagan? I can’t remember, and it’s not important either, as they were all interchangeable anyway, all speaking from the exact same script that they themselves drafted. It was precisely this moment that the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that the USA was hell-bent on global domination.

Many of us did not like the Clinton regime for plenty of valid reasons, foremost among them their amputation of rump Yugoslavia ......




Orwellian Fare:


........................... It is because all crimes are equal for journalists like Davies, but some crimes are more equal than others, that the public can’t conceive the utterly ruthless nature of Nato’s actions in Ukraine. To the public, it really does seem like the West is spending tens of billions of dollars to defend Ukrainian freedom. Even after the human catastrophes of Western ‘intervention’ in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the public can still be made to believe that the chief Western concern in Iran is women’s rights, rather than the oil for which ‘we’, unprovoked, illegally and brutally overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953.

It is only the awesome, brainwashing power of our state-corporate media that makes it possible for anyone to imagine that this is how Great Powers behave in the real world. If foreign policy really worked that way, planet Earth would long since have been transformed into a paradise of peace, equality and justice. We need only look around us to see how close we are to achieving that aim.



... What many people don’t realize — and what some people both inside the government and out of it purposefully ignore — is that Snowden wasn’t traveling to Russia, but merely through it.

.... Snowden’s itinerary was arranged such that he wouldn’t land in countries that would extradite him to the United States. Nor would he cross U.S. airspace along the way. He was to make four flights in all, taking him from Hong Kong to Moscow, then Havana, Cuba; Caracas, Venezuela and finally Quito.

However, upon arriving in Moscow, Snowden was escorted by Russian security officials to an airport conference room, where they informed him that, while he was flying to Moscow, the Obama administration had invalidated his passport.

He’d spend the next 40 days at the Sheremetyevo airport, during which he applied to 27 countries for political asylum. “Not a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure,”






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


At the risk of upsetting the entire internet, the annexation of those four Ukrainian territories seems like a great time to end this war to me. Does anyone honestly believe a significant percentage of the people who live there want a massive counteroffensive on their doorstep? I don’t.

The west knowingly provoked this war, the thing experts warned for years would happen did happen, and now Ukraine lost some territory. Rather than risking millions or billions of lives escalating this conflict, it seems sensible to draw a line under it. You can yell “Putin bad!” and “International law!” all you want, but it’s just a cold hard fact that after the annexation the US/NATO/Ukraine tandem is going to be presented with the choice of either ending the bloodshed or massively, massively escalating it. Pretty easy choice, in my opinion.

There are two kinds of people who want peace in Ukraine: those who want it to come now via diplomacy, negotiation and compromise, and those who want it to come years from now after pouring millions of lives into driving Russia out of every last inch of Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. You either support a negotiated settlement right now or you support an extremely long, protracted proxy war that risks nuclear annihilation, ends up costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars, and has no guarantee of success. And the latter position is what’s being planned for: ...

Of course I don’t actually believe the fighting will end in this way at this time; there’s too much riding on keeping the bloodshed going. I’m just highlighting the fairly obvious fact that it could end now, and should end now.



Vladimir Putin has approved the annexation of four territories in eastern Ukraine, whose addition to the Russian Federation now await authorization from Russia’s other branches of government.

The Zelensky government responded to the move by applying to join NATO, only to be immediately shut down by US and NATO officials. Can’t have sacrificial pawns trying to rise above their station on the grand chessboard, after all....



Other Quotes of the Week:

Putin:  Putin said Russia’s “geopolitical adversaries” are prepared to turn any country “into a ground zero of a crisis,” and to unleash “bloody massacres.”

Putin: Unwilling to accept the inevitable end of its unipolar hegemony, the West is generating problems and crises everywhere in order to cling to the past, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. “We are witnessing a complex process of a more just world order being established ” Putin told the video conference of intelligence and security chiefs of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). “Unipolar hegemony is inexorably collapsing, this is an objective reality that the West categorically refuses to accept, and we see everything that follows from this.”
 
Doctorow: The notion that there will be some ‘kiss and make up’ between Russia and the Collective West is now fully discredited. An enemy is an enemy. A clash of civilizations is a clash of civilizations.
 
Stockman: So let’s be clear: Washington’s dunderheaded intervention in the intramural spat between Russia and Ukraine and the accompanying global Sanctions War is the surely the stupidest, most destructive project to arise from the banks of the Potomac in modern times. And the architects of this perfidious folly—Biden, Blinkin, Sullivan, Nuland et. al.—cannot be condemned harshly enough.

Gallagher: But Ian Bremmer has accurately been described as “the man with his finger just off the pulse,”  so while the US will benefit in some ways now, the long term might not be so great.'

Radagast: What you have to understand about normies is their brains can't properly process negative information. It just doesn't show up on their radar, it catches them by surprise. Even the world's most powerful people are still normies at heart: They're genuinely surprised by inflation.










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

Shermer: Race Matters

Does race still matter in America? Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the past several years you know it most certainly does. But why? A century and a half after the Civil War emancipated millions of slaves and outlawed the practice for good, half a century after the Civil Rights act and corresponding legislation put an end to Jim Crow, and more than a decade after the first Black President was elected to the highest office of the nation, why are we not now in a race-blind society? 



Is it just me, or do other people wake up in the morning, catch up with news, and struggle to understand what, in the name of She-Hulk’s wobbling cheeks, is going on?

............................ It’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out why (some) people think it’s OK to write what they do. I’m not talking about ethics here, although there is that too. It’s the absurdity of some of these ideas and how seemingly intelligent people can consider them to be correct. I never did have a good insight into why people think the way they do. Heck, I can’t even figure that out what’s going on in my own head some days. But things have simply degenerated into farce.
 
 
 
... So, for uttering a biological truth that seems unpalatable in today’s climate, the students have accused Hammer of being transphobic and purveying “hate”.
 


I’m not going to dissect this entire article from Nature; I’m too dispirited about how it, its American equivalent Science, and, indeed, nearly all scientific journals I read, are acting, tinting their science for ideology. ......






Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

American Triumphalism and "Normie Theories of Democracy"

Bashing Fukuyama is the pastime of midwits. In the Twitter version of events, he’s understood to be the guy who said nothing will ever happen again, and then things in the news happen, and so he’s always being proved wrong. People who actually read and understood The End of History and the Last Man know that the argument wasn’t that there would be no more wars or genocides, but that there would be no serious alternative to liberal democracy. Thus, while the “war on terror” might’ve killed a few people and gotten us to indefinitely take our shoes off before flying, there was never a realistic possibility that Muslim fundamentalism could either seriously threaten the most advanced societies of the world or provide an alternative to their governing model in any but some of the most backward areas of the globe.

The rise of China was always something completely different. Here is a country of 1.4 billion people that appeared to be in the process of surpassing the US economically, and doing it without anything resembling democratic institutions or a free press. It’s done this while becoming a world leader in science and technology, and with extremely low rates of crime, drug use, and illegitimacy. The Taliban or ISIS was never going to tempt other nations to follow its lead. But in recent years, smart analysts have made a serious case for the “China Model,” which emphasizes technocratic skill and political meritocracy over voting and a mobilized citizenry.  ....

Unlike with China, no one ever thought Russia was going to surpass the US and become the world’s dominant economy. Nonetheless, before 2022, it wasn’t crazy to believe that it could experience decent economic growth, and become a mid-tier European power, maybe comparable in economic might and cultural influence to Germany or France. ...

Although we have three months left, I think that regardless of what else happens 2022 will be notable for being the year that both of these threats to liberal democracy collapsed. And the fact that they collapsed in such different ways indicates that there is something extremely robust in Western societies that will allow them to dominate the world for the foreseeable future. ......

The end of history thesis was always as much about perception as reality. It wasn’t simply a matter of liberal democracies having the most robust economies and most stable governments, but that this view of their strengths was widely shared. Last year, Peter Thiel called China a “weirdly autistic country,” arguing that it is “profoundly uncharismatic, and I think that’s a very big limitation they have.” Yet autism is an extremely masculine trait, and can be appealing if it is combined with confidence and competence. One could have imagined a Chinese propaganda campaign aimed at the outside world that said “no, we don’t have Hollywood or Lizzo, but we’re doing amazing things in high-speed rail and quantum computing.” But an autist who is also a hypochondriac and won’t leave his house because he’s afraid of getting the sniffles doesn’t appeal to anyone. I used to think that China could be the kind of autist that builds SpaceX. Instead, it’s the kind that is afraid to look strangers in the eye and stays up all night playing with his train collection. ................

The higher classes will embrace embryo selection and perhaps genetic engineering, leaving the bottom of society further behind than before, even if in absolute terms things get better for almost everyone. Policy decisions made in Washington will matter to a certain extent, but the most important among them won’t have much to do with what we consider hot-button political issues.

As for the rest of the world, they will continue to become more like us. There really isn’t any other option.



[Not] Satirical Fare:


Bruce Willis retired from acting following a diagnosis of aphasia, which causes a person to have difficulty communicating with others, but a "digital twin" of the American actor using deepfake technology will live on in future films and commercials. 

The Telegraph reported Willis is the "first Hollywood star" to sell the rights of his digital twin in perpetuity. The actor will license his digital rights through a company called Deekcake, which specializes in artificial intelligence. 



Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)