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Friday, October 7, 2022

2022-10-07

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

Economic and Market Fare:

Yves Smith and Nouriel Roubini were both worth heeding in 2007:
We're again in the Wile E Coyote phase of a financial crisis, but this time, the real economy problems are far worse than in 2008.

.... I never thought I’d want Bernanke, Paulson, and Geithner back. I was very critical of them at the time, but they look like paragon of competence compared to the likes of Janet Yellen, Kwasi Kwarteng, and Ursula von der Leyen.

...... Archegos demonstrated a lack of regulatory interest in “total return swaps” which in simple terms allow speculators to create highly leveraged equity exposures. Highly leveraged equity exposures was what gave the world the 1929 crash. The very existence of this product shows the degree to which the officialdom has unlearned big and costly lessons.

... If the prospect of Credit Suisse going pear shaped in combination with the underlying level of European tsuris doesn’t persuade you that the financial system may soon hit a air pocket, Nick Corbishley last Friday wrote up an unprecedented warning by the European Systemic Risk Board.

... Another reason this is important is that central banks are normally the last to admit that a crisis is around the corner. In fact, when they finally sound the alarm, it means the damage is already done and the crisis — which they invariably helped create — is already here

...... That brings us to the deteriorating state of the real economy. It has been remarkable to see how little economic commentary there has been on the impact of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks on Europe. As Doomberg noted:
While few events can compare to 9/11, what transpired on September 26, 2022, will have enormous implications – both economic and humanitarian – and adds an accelerant to a fire that was already dangerously hot.
.... So the only question is when that reality is more fully reflected in asset prices. If I were you, I’d assume the brace position.

so dismiss 'Dr. Doom' at your own risk:



The spectre of financial crisis now looms alongside pestilence (Covid19), war (Ukraine and unreported hidden Middle East and Africa conflicts) and famine (real in emerging nations, high food and energy prices elsewhere). Frantically cutting growth forecasts, the IMF entitled its latest economic forecast ‘Gloomy and More Uncertain’.

Noise – day-to-day gyrations and speculation- masks the fact that a major re-set, the largest since 2007, may be underway.

End of Magical Economics

The first driver is that magical economic thinking and era of ultra-cheap money is coming to a close. ........





.......... While I’m no great fan of Warren Buffet, he was spot on with the observation that “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” And the tide appears to be going out right now.



.. If you follow financial markets, then you’ve undoubtedly heard people like Scott Minerd say that he thinks the Fed will continue with rate increases until “something breaks.” He’s been arguing for some time that the Fed is steering us into a crisis by relying on backward-looking price (and other) signals for guidance about the underlying strength of the US economy. He’s worried that if the Fed keeps tightening the way markets currently anticipate, then it will lead to a financial accident that could “spill over into the financial markets.”

......... If history is any guide, and in financial markets it almost always is, the Fed will be forced to pause, if not pivot, on policy in the relatively near future.

They may deny it. They may not want to do it. They may refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of such a drastic change in policy.

But change they will.




China’s large structural trade surpluses are the consequence of internal economic imbalances, which means that any external pressure that results in a contraction of its trade surplus must be accommodated by shifts in these internal imbalances.

....................... I should reemphasize that I don’t know if export growth in China is likely to slow dramatically in the coming months. This will depend on whether there is enough of a slowdown in the growth of U.S. and European demand to counter policies in China aimed at subsidizing and expanding manufacturing. Beijing’s supply-side stimulus measures have forced growth in the country’s total output—even if this represents much slower growth than in the past. But for all its talk about boosting domestic demand, Beijing has found it almost impossible to keep domestic demand from stagnating, so over the past two years it has become increasingly reliant on its soaring trade surplus to reconcile weak growth in output with even weaker domestic demand.


Mitchell: Two diametrically-opposed approaches to dealing with inflation – stupidity versus the Japanese way

.......... Japan has faced the same global supply pressures that have pushed the current inflationary impulse.

But while other nations are busily engaging in fiscal austerity in the misconceived need to ‘repair their budgets after the pandemic’ and their central banks are hiking like crazy, Japan has held its nerve with respect to interest rates and has been particularly active in using fiscal policy to reduce the cost-of-living pressures on ordinrary Japanese citizens.

A world away in other words from elsewhere.



Things are starting to move fast.

Overnight, AMD stunned investors when it preannounced shockingly bad revenue and margin numbers, making a mockery of its own guidance from August, and signaling that between then and now - i.e., September - the global economy fell off a cliff. ...



This caught my eye:
“Debreu noted in his Nobel Prize lecture that the success of the mathematization of economic theory depended “on the fact that the commodity space has the structure of a real vector space”. We have shown that this is incorrect. The “price vector” is not a vector, and GET [General Equilibrium Theory] is therefore false. But we may go further and assert that not only was the proof incorrect, what was set out to be proved was not true in the first place. The real economy cannot be brought into equilibrium by adjusting prices. And indeed, the real economy is never in equilibrium.”
That’s the concluding paragraph in Philip George’s paper in the recently published Real World Economics Review #101.

The emperor, apparently, has no clothes.

But, then, we all knew that, didn’t we?

I wrote earlier this week about the difficulty we have in determining the efficacy of a supposed body of knowledge.  The arbiters of knowledge have a vested interest in maintaining the outward appearance of whatever it is they study.  They act like a priesthood intoning in ancient languages and using secret signs to distinguish themselves from the ordinary folk whom they intend to control or influence.  The problem is that we, those of us on the outside, can only rely on those arbiters for assurance that the efficacy they proclaim for themselves is actually, well, efficacious.  Worse, within a wide discipline such as economics, or applied mathematics as it has now become, the various sub-specialities are so specialized and the knowledge so arcane that anyone not within close proximity to it is unable to offer an opinion as to its validity.

This has become a fundamental and defining issue within economics.  The discipline needs good jolt of reality.  It needs a new direction.  It needs to shake off the errors of its past and begin anew.

The problem is that those errors, as George points out, are huge and have become iconic components of the discipline at large.  General equilibrium is one such component.

It doesn’t exist as a natural phenomenon.  It never did.  It never could.  ....



Vids of the Week:







Quotes of the Week:

Reid: we are coming off the back of one of the worst Septembers, worst Q3s and worst YTD of our careers in terms of the the number of assets tracked by Deustsche Bank declining.

Molavi: If nothing else…2022 has taught me I know nothing.

BAML: - Cracks are multiplying across markets: UK assets, CS spreads, swaps, UST liquidity, CSI, HY bid-asks -- all at extremes.
- Prudent policy risk management is to go slower here; reduce the risk of a forced reversal later.

Macklem: we can’t count on easing pressure on global prices to lower inflation in Canada

Suzuki: Conventional economics is a form of brain damage
Syll: Yours truly appreciates scientists like David Suzuki. With razor-sharp intellects, they immediately go for the essentials. They have no time for bullshit. And neither should we.



Charts: 
1:
4: well, this certainly does not look recessionary:


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Bubble Fare:


There are a lot of different ways to analyze markets; fundamental and technical analysis are two of the most popular. Certainly, assessing the likely future path for corporate earnings and studying price patterns and momentum are both worthwhile if not crucial to successful investing. Fundamentals tell a story about trends in the business cycle and technicals tell you how investors react to hearing that story. Each, then, is most useful when viewed in context of the other.

As to the fundamentals, history suggests that the rapid rises in the dollar, interest rates and oil prices over the past couple of years represent a uniquely bearish trifecta that will likely have a very negative effect on earnings over the next year or so.

Long-term technicals, notably momentum, appear to confirm this analysis.

And bearish fundamentals paired with bearish technicals may simply be an effective way of defining a bear market (better at least than the arbitrary 20% rule).  ....




..... Now in 2022 JP Morgan's markets "guru" Marko Kolanovic has been bullish all year. However, this past week he turned bearish and admitted that his assumption central banks would NOT make a massive policy error in 2022 was wrong. Central banks just made a massive policy error in 2021, so in 2022 he believed they were going to get it just right. You have to be an Ivy League PhD to believe that moronic delusion. What we are witnessing is BULLISH capitulation. 

Also capitulating, the aptly named BEAR Traps Report, now expects a Fed pivot by November. 

"In the coming 2-4 weeks, we expect a meaningful walk-back from Powell with a focus on financial stability" ....

Last week, Corporate bonds saw their biggest liquidation since March 2020. However, the *special* bailout powers that were granted to the Fed during the pandemic were rescinded in 2020.

Which means the deleveraging event that Wall Street never sees coming is ALREADY underway.



There was a lot of trolling of bears during the pivot rally this past summer and I've noticed that it has come back into style. Charles Hugh Smith who wrongly predicted new all time highs in the summer, is back for another bullish swing at bat. He asserts that everyone should "Play Devil's Advocate" to what he believes has become the new standard (bearish) consensus. I'm not going to refute the hard facts because there are none to refute, but first off I will say that any active trader who is down in 2022 needs to reassess their trading strategy in a down market, NOT try to pretend this is still a bull market. That is a dangerous game to play. He asserts that there is no analog for the current market and therefore one can evince "near ZERO " conviction. Overall, the article is a love affair with denial. 
"Very simply, nobody knows what's going to happen"
Anyone who doesn't understand the current level of asset deflation risk is the investor equivalent of JFK Jr. flying upside down into the ocean, unwilling to trust what their cockpit instruments are telling them. I can never understand how so many people have absolutely no memory that Fed over-tightening collapsed BOTH prior asset bubbles. ...

In 2022 financial reality has come home to roost. The cost of capital is sky-rocketing globally. Real yields are rising at the fastest pace since 2008. The Fed is boxed in. All of which means that risks have NEVER been clearer. But even more importantly, they will NEVER be clearer. So if you can't handle this type of market you should be playing Canasta with the girls on Thursday. This is a bear market and the trend is down. The decline to date equals the decline in the S&P 500 just prior to the October 2008 collapse. 

Now compare the "Devil's Advocate" view to Michael Burry who asserted this week that this set-up is now WORSE than 2008. The exact same "lone voice in the wilderness" in 2008 is pounding the table all over again in 2022. What people forget is that Burry lost a lot of money before he made a lot of money in 2008. Many at the time questioned his sanity. But he was adamant he was right and of course in hindsight it's his detractors who look like idiots NOT HIM. The fact that he was ever "wrong" has been long forgotten



(not just) for the ESG crowd:




Nobel Sci Fare:

They say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. But thanks to these three pioneers in quantum entanglement, perhaps we do.

There were many other species of human on the planet. Svante Pääbo discovered one of them

One of the winners — Dr. K. Barry Sharpless — is now the fifth person in history to win two Nobels.



Other Fare:





Isn't code something worth paying for? Well, frankly, no



“Almost all conversions use Tesla powertrains and batteries. Why? Because people crash a LOT of Teslas, meaning the supply of batteries and motors is plentiful.”



Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


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


Regular Fare:


...... This idea that economic crises are the result of a failure of confidence is seductive for politicians who know just enough about the economy to be dangerous while knowing far too little to act appropriately.  Believing that the economy is financial in nature is likely the first error made by politicians and economists alike.  From this starting point, it is all too easy to witness the panic on trading floors when the proverbial hits the fan

......... Even this though, only scratches the surface of the crisis, because politicians and economists fail to understand the true role of energy in the economy. Indeed, most economic models do not even regard energy as a separate category, seeing it instead as just another, relatively cheap, input barely worth mentioning. The reality – as you and I would quickly discover if we went without food – calories – for any length of time, is that energy is the starting point for everything within the economy. No food equals no workers. No fuel and no electricity equals no capital. As Steve Keen puts it: “Capital without energy is a statue; labour without energy is a corpse!”



Message found in fortune cookie from Panda Take-out reminds us: “The dildo of consequence is seldom lubricated.” Please apply this ancient wisdom to “Joe Biden’s” sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natgas pipelines. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spun the deed as a “tremendous opportunity” to reduce fuel use in Euroland, and shift its prior dependence on affordable Russian energy to ruinously-priced American liquid natural gas (LNG) — a supposed boon to US producers. Lucky us and them!

Let’s get a few technical matters straight about natgas. Gas pipelines allow for cheap gas, without costly intervening shipping procedures. Flows are continuous from producer to customer. LNG requires compression of the gas at super-cold temperatures and costly-to-build LNG tanker ships to keep that gas cold and compressed in transit. Each tanker can carry only so-much gas and the flow is not continuous. At each end of the energy-losing journey there is a costly LNG terminal to load and unload the gas. Bottom line: Euroland customers can’t afford US LNG, though for now they’ll be getting it good and hard to struggle through the first winter of a permanent depression that will feel more like the forecourt of a new dark age. Also bear in mind that American shale gas is a finite resource; that we need plenty of it ourselves; and that the earliest-developed US shale gas fields are crapping out one-by-one.

Secretary Blinken pretends that Europe’s deadly predicament will segue crisply into a new “green renewable” disposition of things as well as a stable-and-balanced new cold war between US-led NATO and Russia, like the 1950s. Secretary Blinken is, of course, completely insane. Germany’s industry will now collapse, the Euro currency will collapse with it, and the exchange rate with the dollars Euroland needs to buy in order to purchase US LNG will bankrupt them further. It will also probably blow up the European Union, which is chiefly a trade scaffold. With industrial production sinking, trade sinks too, and the flimsy cooperative arrangements between nations turn into a desperate competition as each nation of Euroland struggles to stay alive.

Let’s not forget the reason that “Joe Biden” blew up the Nord Streams: to foreclose any chance of Germany wriggling out of US sanctions against Russia. ....

What no government official can acknowledge — even among the Euroland victim nations of this awesome stupidity — is that the US demolition of the Nord Streams was an act-of-war against our own allies. ....



We are but weeks into the autumn, and already the new season has something important to tell us. Its lessons this past week could scarcely be more plainly indicative of the trouble we in the West are in, as those purporting to lead us wander into a future the color of an October dusk.

A terrible clarity is suddenly upon us. We approach the end of pretend, in my read. ...

........... I got off the E.U. bus at that point. You had to call one of the magnificent ideals of the postwar half of the 20th century a corrupted failure. It has been clear since that the E.U. is little more than the instrument with which intolerant ideologues impose the no-exceptions rigors of neoliberal orthodoxy on those Europeans who, whatever their stripe, defend the mediating, democratic institutions through which they can express their will. There is a straight line between Brussels’ antidemocratic conduct and the rise of Meloni and her coalition partners in Italian politics

.... I am with the incoming coalition in Rome on this point, if not on various others. Whatever else they get up to, they wage a war against the tyrannies of technocrats that must be fought if we are to find our way beyond the liberal authoritarianism that now overtakes us. 

..... in all honesty, I do not think Liz Truss rises even to the level of a technocrat. Technocrats at least think, if perversely. By all the evidence, the British PM does not, I suspect because she cannot.

... Truss strikes me as an extreme case of empty-headedness, but she is otherwise typical of her cohort of purported political leaders–an of a great many ordinary people, for that matter. . It is a question of “the vision thing,” as George H.W. Bush, lacking any himself, famously put it. 

... The tyrannies of anti-democratic technocrats, incompetence in high office, the blindness of ideologues: The lesson that lands so squarely upon us this autumn is that leadership in the West is now in critical decline. It has nothing to do with Russia, China, or any of our other scapegoats. Our crisis is ours alone, a rot within that reminds me of the slow demise of the Soviet Union by way of internal decay. This is the truth of events of the past week pushed unkindly before us with a savage clarity.



There are some things more morally reprehensible than lying to and stealing from sick poor people. But the list isn’t very long. Taking advantage of desperate ill people and extracting their every last dime in order to enrich yourself is pretty high on the list of things that should rightly send you to Hell.

The New York Times recently had a jaw-dropping investigative report on how certain “nonprofit” hospitals have stolen from their patients, deliberately misleading people who were eligible for free care into thinking they had to pay for it, and having private debt collectors hound people relentlessly over their medical bills. The report focused on the hospital chain Providence, which was ruthless in extracting money from patients, to the point where it actually misled people into thinking they owed money when they were in fact eligible for free care under state law.


Stealth privatisation was always the endgame for public-private-partnerships.

Britons are divided on many matters, but one uniting force that cuts across regional, party and class lines is jealous pride for the NHS and fierce resistance to its privatisation and the importation of America's grisly omnishambolic health care "system."

But while the British people oppose privatisation, the British investor class are slavering for it. Oligarchs love to loot public services, which is why the IMF is so adamant that the countries it "helps" sell off their public water, housing, even their roads and schools and museums.

Normally, the corrupting, immiserating effects of privatisation happen so slowly that they can feel like a natural phenomenon, a gradual change in the weather that makes everyone a little colder, a little more uncomfortable every day, until one day, the situation is unbearable.

But there have been moments of "big bang" privatisation where governments and oligarchs speed-ran the process of looting the public coffers and transferring them to private hands – think of the sell-off of ex-Soviet state industries to connected insiders. ....

These "public-private partnerships" were billed as a "third way," combining the strengths of both the public and private sectors. In reality, they were a way to transfer a ever-larger sums from the public purse to private investors.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition. .....



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


.... So I would argue we don’t have enough fossil fuels left to reach the hothouse world Ward proposes.  You might reply that tipping points have been or will be reached, methane from permafrost, the amazon rainforest turns into grass and so on.

Sure, but there are negative feedback loops. ...



..... What we have done is so extraordinary in the entire history of the planet (no argument from me here) that it must have some grand meaning and be the right path. But what if it is extraordinarily wrong or a colossal mistake? Humans lived a different way for 3 million years, and that way happened to work long-term (by construction). The current way is untested over relevant time scales, and is so obviously unsustainable at today’s scale that it was most likely a wrong turn. I’m not saying that primitive tribal life is the only solution either: just that today’s civilization isn’t the answer, and perhaps we should contemplate ditching it for something entirely different (built on a foundation of truly sustainable principles, living as subordinate partners to all other life on the planet). .....

Faith in technology is actually pretty scary to me. I’m a technologist. I’ve had a career exploiting cutting-edge capabilities and inventing things that work. As such, I feel like I’m in a better position than most to know what it can and can’t do. It won’t defy physics, for one thing. It’s not an unlimited bag of magic beans. It is easy enough to see where the faith comes from (just look in the rear view mirror). But this facile thinking lacks specificity. I have written about how a complete replacement of fossil fuels by renewable technology could actually be a nightmare for the ecological health of our planet. To emphasize this, the following graphic shows the potentially devastating resource impact that renewable technologies could have on the planet. We would shift the current war on the atmosphere (CO2) into a relentless assault on the land that would never cease since components continuously need replacement as the future grinds on. Our planet cannot likely afford to host our technological ambitions for much longer. ..... 

Growth is destined to end: we have hitched ourselves to a losing wagon. This one should be easy: exponentials don’t survive long-term in finite settings. Do the Math began on this concept, and I still find the need to make the point. It’s surprisingly controversial, so something very strange is going on in the cultural teachings. Since so many of our institutions are designed around the expectation of growth, our faith in its continuance puts us in danger. ...

Animals are worth more than their weight in gold, which suggests that a chicken is worth $60,000, not $5. Both approaches are flawed, but at least hint at how grotesquely distorted our financial approach to everything is. We place essentially no value on stuff that is priceless and that we could not live without. How is that a good idea? Because we base most big decisions on financial considerations, we grossly neglect the important things, and will continue to make devastatingly bad decisions for the long term by continuing this deeply immoral practice. ....




***** Greer: Futures That Work

Among the most curious features of the current predicament of industrial society is that so much of it was set out in great detail so many decades ago. Just at the moment I’m not thinking of the extensive literature on resource depletion that started appearing in the 1950s, which set out in painstaking detail the mess we’re in right now. I’m thinking of those writers who explored the decline and fall of past civilizations, in the vain hope that ours might manage to avoid making all the usual mistakes.  In particular, I’m thinking of Arnold Toynbee.

Arnold Toynbee, contemplating the idiocy of failing elites. 
Toynbee’s all but forgotten these days, but three quarters of a century ago his was a name to conjure with. His gargantuan 12-volume work A Study of History set out to trace the histories of all known civilizations and, from that data set, determine the factors that drove the rise and fall of human societies. One- and two-volume abridgements leaving out most of the supporting data were widely available back in the day—my parents, who were not exactly highbrow East Coast intellectuals, had a copy on a bookshelf in the family room when my age was still in single digits. Plenty of academic historians denounced Toynbee, but a great many people read his work and saw the value in it.

Those days are of course long past, but there’s an interesting twist to the disappearance of his ideas from the collective dialogue of our time. Those ideas weren’t rejected because they turned out to be wrong. They were rejected because Toynbee was right. ......

.... That’s how civilizations rise. Civilizations fall, according to Toynbee, when the formerly creative minority stops being creative and sinks into a rut. In Toynbee’s terms, it changes from a creative minority to a dominant minority, and it settles for maintaining control over the society by force and fraud because it no longer has the ability to inspire confidence and loyalty by coming up with effective responses to the challenges faced by society. You know that your society is run by a dominant minority when, no matter what the problem is, the people in power always insist on the same solutions. You also know that your society is run by a dominant minority when the same problems come up over and over again, because they’re never actually solved—they’re just swept under the rug in a frantic effort to insist that the same old solutions really will work. .......

We already know, after all, that Starmer’s project won’t work. Germany pursued the same set of gimmicks most of two decades before, and it failed.  As I noted on this blog two weeks ago, if windpower and solar PV farms could provide an industrial nation with an adequate energy supply, the Germans would be fat and happy right now, powering their industrial system on wind and sun while the rest of the world reeled under the blows of high energy costs. In case you haven’t noticed, that’s not what happened. Wind and sunlight are diffuse, intermittent energy sources very poorly suited to a modern power grid, so the illusion of the German Energiewende was propped up with vast amounts of cheap Russian natural gas. Now that the prop isn’t there any more, industrial firms are leaving Germany as fast as they can, while ordinary Germans are bracing themselves for a winter of blackouts and energy rationing. ...

................... Set aside the things that have already been proven not to work, look at unfashionable possibilities that do work, consider all the options, and make ample room for personal, local, and regional experimentation:  that approach offers genuine hope at a time when the establishment is busy pursuing policies that have already proven hopelessly inadequate. Put enough effort into this less rigid approach, and it becomes possible to piece together a toolkit of possibilities that would make the twilight of the fossil fuel age much less difficult for everyone. That’s a goal worth pursuing. ...


Hayes: Contagion

....... Given that all politicians — elected or not — are focused on short-term myopic policies, they typically default to printing money to solve nearly all issues. There are very few problems that an infusion of cash can’t fix, which often makes printing money the easiest and quickest solution; it can be done immediately, without much discussion or deliberation. The alternative — the long-term restructuring of our global economy — would entail immense pain for certain stakeholders, and would necessitate having an honest conversation about the true state of our civilisation. Both of those requirements are non-starters for our short-sighted political friends, so regardless of whether your government practises capitalism, communism, socialism, or fascism, they all inevitably turn to “printing money-ism” to paper over any and all problems.

...... At the same time, the undeclared WW3 is intensifying, headlined by recent attacks on critical gas pipelines (see Nordstream I and II). The situation is putting a strain on the global economy as it is, and the compounding financial effects of a withdrawal of credit from the system are evident. The major central banks have begun to backslide on their promises to fight inflation, and the next pandemic — the Yield Curve Control (YCC) virus — is quickly spreading. Over a long enough time horizon, all central banks will succumb.



Essentially the entire developed part of the world is currently embarked on a crash program to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy system of the economy. The program has two main parts: first the suppression of the production and distribution of fossil fuels; and second the construction of large numbers of wind and solar generation facilities to replace them. Both parts of the program are currently underway simultaneously in all advanced countries, as a matter of what we are told is the highest moral urgency.

But will the coming fossil-fuel-free system actually work to provide the energy we need to run our modern economies? There are very substantial reasons to think that big problems are inevitable, the main one being that wind and solar generators don’t produce anything most of the time, and can’t be ramped up on demand at a time of need.

So surely, there must be multiple small to medium-scale demonstration projects around the world showing exactly how this fossil-fuel-free future system can be accomplished, and how much it will cost.

Actually, and incredibly, no. There is no such thing anywhere in the world as a functioning demonstration project that provides full energy to an economy of any size without reliance on fossil fuels, and using only carbon-emissions-free sources like wind, solar, hydro and/or storage. There isn’t even a demonstration project that supplies just the electricity sector of any economy (typically about 25-35% of final energy usage) with the energy it needs free of fossil fuels. Indeed, there isn’t anything remotely close. ....

......... And it gets worse. The closest thing to a demonstration project in the world has failed disastrously. .....

..... And what happens when the proposed replacements for the fossil fuels turn out not to be able to do the job of keeping the economy running? Europe is about to show us the answer to that question this winter.



Yves here. We’ve written regularly about some of the constraints on the famed shift to green energy, including limited amounts of key commodities, plus high environmental costs in mining and refining some of them. And this piece is one of the few to mention energy costs.

Unintentionally, this article underscores a point we often make: the only way to avoid worst outcomes is radical conservation. Europe is about to have it forced on them at extremely high cost. It won’t be pretty.

..................... The requirement to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels represents the biggest technical challenge humanity has ever faced. To avoid the emissions pulse just mentioned, we must reduce energy usage in non-essential applications (such as for tourism or the manufacture of optional consumer goods). But such reductions will provoke social and political pushback, given that economies are structured to require continual growth, and citizens are conditioned to expect ever-higher levels of consumption. If the energy transition is the biggest technical challenge ever, it is also the biggest social, economic, and political challenge in human history. It may also turn out to be an enormous geopolitical challenge, if nations end up fighting over access to the minerals and metals that will be the enablers of the energy transition.



Recycling plastic is a bad idea and, until we can be sure of where it’s going, we should stop doing it. We should put plastic in the landfill, instead. This sounds like a really spicy hot take, but it’s not. I think it is pretty much accepted among people who study these things. The oceans are full of plastic, and that’s bad – but none of the plastic in the oceans comes from a British landfill. It almost all comes from developing-world countries, and by recycling we make the problem worse. 




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





Aaron Siri was finally able to force the CDC to relinquish their V-safe data, which showed approximately 10% suffered significant adverse reactions to vaccination. This article will explain why that is so important. ...


Wasn't the vaccine meant to stay in the injection site?

A case report published two days ago in Vaccines Journal, confirms what we all know (from non-narrative scientists and the Pfizer documents) but has been denied since vaccination began. Another conspiracy theory come true. I’m struggling to find any conspiracy theories that don’t come true at the moment.


Pfizer and Moderna-paid Scientists Did not Even Look Into It


Daniel Horowitz wrote a fabulous piece on recent studies and alerted me to a Kaiser preprint posted October 1.



Last week, I detailed Prof Kojima’s attempt to make sense of the statistical shenanigans of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID). Oddly enough, although NIID researchers seem more than willing to link Covid deaths to insufficient vaccination in children, they don’t seem very interested in linking excess deaths at the start of 2022 to excessive vaccinations in adults. Prof Kojima, on the other hand, is a bit more inquisitive. And with excess deaths vastly outnumbering Covid deaths from January to June, who can blame him.

.................. So what can we conclude from all this data? Well for some people, it’s going to be a long winter. But for many elderly people soon to become eligible for their fifth jab, it’s going to be quite short.


Completely!

....... The work is funded by the people who are guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, but there are no competing interests including shirking the responsibility for their crimes against humanity and genocide.

“We thoroughly investigated our crimes actions and found that we didn’t do anything wrong”.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

“Compulsory vaccination of mobilized citizens, in our opinion, looks like madness, like a betrayal” — Russia’s Independent Association of Physicians





Anecdotal Fare:


(And yet the University of California system STILL requires ALL students, faculty and staff to get injected with the toxins killing people right before our eyes, worldwide, day after day.)



Pushback Fare:

It's not often that a pediatrician speaks out publicly against the COVID vaccine. I finally found one that was willing to risk losing her license to speak out frankly with the camera rolling.



COVID Corporatocracy Fare:

The publication of Prozac Nation was a societal inflection point that ushered in multiple pharmacological disasters

........... 

II. An inflection point
Elizabeth Wurtzel was a fierce talent. Yes, she went to Harvard but she was the embodiment of the promise. A third wave feminist, she was unabashed in her celebration of sexuality and pleasure. As a writer she was a sorceress — able to pull magic, truth, and wisdom out of thin air. 

..........

III. The misuse of a once-in-a-generation talent
There was always a strange sleight of hand involved in Prozac Nation. In spite of the extraordinary psychological heavy lifting for over three hundred pages — the remedy in the end was a magic little pill. .....

The tragedy of Elizabeth Wurtzel is that Pharma took a spectacularly talented thinker and writer and used her to betray her whole generation. The end result has been the gradual enslavement of Generation X (and the rest of society) to the cartel. ............

The study in Molecular Psychiatry on which that article is based is (here). If you click through to read The Guardian article you’ll see defenders of the status quo at the end explaining that ‘it works even though there is no evidence that it works.’ Sound familiar?

By this point, about 1 in 5 American women and 1 in 10 men are on these drugs. They are given to pregnant women even though they are linked with autism (see literature review in my thesis). People are on them for decades in spite of no safety studies on long term use. They create dependency and once started, it is very difficult to stop.

It was not a foregone conclusion that Prozac would take off in the United States. German regulators (who actually examined the underlying data) rejected it and it was only approved in Sweden through outright bribery. But FDA regulators were primed to look the other way. In the meantime, Ms. Wurtzel made mental illness and these magic fluoride capsules sexy and cool. One can see how this set the stage for normalizing the other mass poisoning events that followed.

The adoption of SSRIs followed a pattern. Pharma pushed them, the FDA blessed them based on shoddy studies, the media and trusted messengers promoted them, and society gobbled up that snake oil like candy. Anyone who questioned the grift was shunned.

There was just too much money to be made for anyone to do the right thing. Once the pattern was set, more pharmacological disasters soon followed.

Next we were told that opioids, including OxyContin®, were not addictive. Once again the FDA blessed them based on shoddy data, the media promoted them, and society took these pills in massive quantities. On average, every year the U.S. now loses more Americans to opioids than died in combat in the entire (decade-long) Vietnam War.

Now it is happening yet again with Safe & Effective™️ Covid-19 shots that disable and kill at an astonishing rate. There is just so much money to be made from poisoning society that Pharma (+ the media and the political system that they own) cannot resist. .....






Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:




Vladimir Putin has just about finalized the accession of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), plus the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, into the Russian state. This is a peace offer, even if precious few will recognize it as such. Putin was never eager to make this move, it took him 8 years to recognize the independence of DPR and LPR, but it was the only solution left.

As State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin put it this week: “..accession to Russia is the only way to save the people living in the four former Ukrainian territories from shelling by Ukrainian troops. “The only way to end this is reunification [with Russia].” Obviously, Ukraine and the west label the accession, and the referendums that “solidified” it, illegal, but it’s not under Russian law, and that is what counts for Putin.

After the votes, the situation was scrutinized by Russian Constitutional Court, the Duma, every institution that Russian law requires. Not perhaps international law, whatever that is, but why would Russia bother with that? How, for instance, does “international law” view the killing of 14,000+ Russians living in Ukraine since 2014, by Ukrainian forces?

The US-driven Maidan coup, where an elected president was ousted, in violation of “international law”, is a place to start. The ill-begotten hodge-podge patchwork state of Ukraine was always an accident waiting to happen. ......

Here’s a video of Petro Poroshenko, the chocolate prince who became the 2nd president, talking about the Russian speaking people in the east. For western Ukraine, they were little more than cattle. But there were more of them than of western Ukrainians, so a coup was needed. No problem for Nuland, but a problem for Putin. Russia protects Russians, wherever they live. Watch the English subtitles.

... This is why Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 2022, that and the increasing threat of NATO-allied troops and equipment on the border. And said: no nukes, no NATO, no nazis. Of course, the nazis still have Zelensky under control, reneging on his campaign promise to seek peace, NATO moved close than ever, and boy, would they love to get their hands on some nukes.

And that is why Putin decided to take over the 4 regions. It was the only way he saw to protect the Russian people living there. He was, and is, probably right. 

Now, Ukraine and Zelensky claim there is a history that makes all of present day Ukraine a state with solid borders, culture, language etc., but it was only in 1922, 100 years ago, that the borders were drawn, under Soviet leadership, and, as I said, it was just a patchwork thing. There is a Ukrainian history, but it’s on a much smaller piece of land than what is today touted as Ukraine. ....

Basically, Putin’s peace offer is: we have what we needed, now leave us alone. You know very well you can’t beat us, so let’s sit down and talk.



Imagine Moscow was nuked yesterday, and this morning The New York Times ran a frontpage headline “Moscow nuked: Russia proves its hostility to Europe again”. Sounds pretty crazy? Yet, in a manner of speaking, that is what happened last week.

.......... Some big picture reflections

The attack on the Nord Stream pipelines is one of those moments when the fog of war suddenly lifts, allowing one to see the reality (if willing to look).

1. The attack on Nord Stream is an attack on Germany, which is a major European ally. It speaks to the impunity with which the US now acts.

2. The US attack on Russia’s sub-sea assets risks retaliation against US and Western sub-sea assets. That opens another pathway to nuclear conflict, supplementing the existing pathway via the battlefields of Ukraine.

3. The press coverage speaks volumes about the state of our media. We are talking about the elite media. The coverage is shocking in its egregious intentional deception: the press narrative simply does not compute. .....




***** Jacques Baud: Kharkov and Mobilization

The recapture of the Kharkov region at the beginning of September appears to be a success for Ukrainian forces. Our media exulted and relayed Ukrainian propaganda to give us a picture that is not entirely accurate. A closer look at the operations might have prompted Ukraine to be more cautious.

From a military point of view, this operation is a tactical victory for the Ukrainians and an operational/strategic victory for the Russian coalition.

On the Ukrainian side, Kiev was under pressure to achieve some success on the battlefield. Volodymyr Zelensky was afraid of a fatigue from the West and that its support would stop. This is why the Americans and the British pressed him to carry out offensives in the Kherson sector. These offensives, undertaken in a disorganised manner, with disproportionate casualties and without success, created tensions between Zelensky and his military staff.

For several weeks now, Western experts have been questioning the presence of the Russians in the Kharkov area, as they clearly had no intention to fight in the city. In reality, their presence in this area was only aimed at affixing the Ukrainian troops so that they would not go to the Donbass, which is the real operational objective of the Russians.

In August, indications suggested that the Russians had planned to leave the area well before the start of the Ukrainian offensive.  ....

For the Ukrainians, it is a Pyrrhic victory. They advanced into Kharkov without encountering any resistance and there was hardly any fighting. Instead, the area became a huge “killing zone” (“зона поражения”), where Russian artillery would destroy an estimated number of 4,000-5,000 Ukrainians (about 2 brigades), while the Russian coalition suffered only marginal losses as there was no fighting. .....

In the belief that they are weakening Russia, our media are promoting the gradual disappearance of Ukrainian society. It seems like a paradox, but this is consistent with the way our leaders view Ukraine. They did not react to the massacres of Russian-speaking Ukrainian civilians in the Donbass between 2014 and 2022, nor do they mention Ukraine’s losses today. In fact, for our media and authorities, Ukrainians are a kind of “Untermenschen” whose life is only meant to satisfy the goals of our politicians. ....

Moreover, these referenda will freeze a situation and make Russia’s conquests irreversible. Interestingly, if the West had let Zelensky continue with the proposal he made to Russia at the end of March 2022, Ukraine would more or less retained its pre-February 2022 configuration. As a reminder, Zelensky had made a first request for negotiation on 25 February, which the Russians had accepted, but which the European Union refused ....

The problem with today’s Western leaders is that none of them currently has the intellectual capacity to deal with the challenges that they themselves have created through their own foolishness ...

The Russians—and Vladimir Putin in particular—have always been very clear in their statements and have consistently and methodically done what they said they would do. No more, no less. One can of course disagree with what he says, but it is a major and probably even criminal mistake not to listen to what he says. For if we had listened, we could have prevented the situation becoming what it is.

It is also interesting to compare the current general situation with what was described in the RAND Corporation reports published in 2019 as the blueprint for trying to destabilise Russia. ....



Putin set the goals of the SMO. The demilitarization of an enormous military, stocked for eight years and restocked feverishly from the bases and warehouses of 30 countries in NATO, is going very well. The Ukies had 750,000 men in trenches and fortified positions and embedded in big cities, shielded by civilians everywhere from Kiev to the smallest settlement in Donbass.Ukraine had a significant air force and stout air defenses with BUKs and S-300s in large numbers.

The Russians have reduced this order of battle markedly. The navy of Ukraine is gone. It has no functioning naval bases. The Ukie air defenses have been reduced to mobile radars and a few extant S-300s. The most effective air defense they have is the tactic of massing MANPADS and receiving real time alerts from NATO of oncoming Russian jets and helos. This has not stopped the Russian aerospace forces, though it is a hampering defense that has to be recognized as a threat. The Ukie air force is 95% gone, only replenished from NATO with aircraft that stay in the battle for minutes before they are reduced to losses.

Over 500,000 Ukies are gone, dead and forever off the battlefield. Thousands of mercs have been killed or chased off the battlefield.

The entire junior officer echelon of Ukraine is gone. US and NATO officers are the tactical commanders, as communications in the battlefield document. American and British voices give the commands. Videos are available as proof.

Every strategic offensive launched by Kiev (and the NATO command running their military) has been destroyed. The only ground they have gained is ground ceded in order to draw the Ukies into the open or to reposition Russian forces to better lines of defense.

The Ukies have lost forever Mariupol, Kherson, Melitopol, all of Lugansk, 65% of Donetsk, their access to the sea (except with Russian permission at Odessa), the air space over most of Ukraine, and sovereign control over their utilities and transport systems which exist only as long as the Russians allow. Ukraine is under its 4th total mobilization. By winter's end it will have lost another 100,000 of their cannon fodder. Likely, too, they will have lost what they hold in Donetsk oblast.

The Russians have done this while exposing only 15% of their military. ....

... What the generals have done is send steel and explosives to demilitarize the Ukraine, not manpower. Artillery, bombs, rockets and missiles are fighting the war, saving Russian manpower while decimating Ukie force structure.

As I view the war, it is going very well for the mission Putin set.

Do I think it is optimal? If you take the SMO as a small part of a larger war (which it is in fact), this small war is going very well. Ukraine will be destroyed and NATO will have no proxy. NATO will have to send its own manpower. That stage of warfare will fracture the Alliance. The US will have to coerce a new proxy force to fight Russia out in the open sectors of Ukraine. They won't be in fortified positions. And they won't have civilians as shields.

If the US manages to spread the war into Poland and Belarus and Moldova, a few hypersonic missiles from Russia will quench the enthusiasm of those NATO countries, and Russia will join with Belarus in an overwhelming punishment of Poles and Baltics. If Kaliningrad is touched, the attackers will lose their capitals and HQs.

What the Russian military has not done does not indicate what it cannot do. The GS has a means to accomplish the goal of demilitarization and they are employing it. Strategically, the SMO is very successful. Pulling out of Izyum and Lyman are blips that don't even factor in the military scheme of things. Pawns on the board.



..... More likely to me is, to use a World War II analogy, that now that Kiev’s Operation Citadel in the Kursk Salient is petering out, it’s time for a really powerful mechanized offensive accompanied by strikes deep in the rear with no holding back. One must remember that Putin said they hadn’t really started – I think we’re about to see what he meant. And sooner, I would guess, rather than later. I can’t imagine that anyone in Moscow wants this thing still going on next February.



After Daria Dugina, daughter of Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin, was killed via car-bomb in Moscow this summer, Russia accused Ukraine of sponsoring the murder, and the Ukrainian government denied involvement. Apparently Russia was right. 

This week the New York Times reported that, according to unnamed US officials, “parts of the Ukrainian government” authorized the bombing, though whether President Zelensky himself OK’d it remains unclear.




Ukraine as John Pilger saw it eight years ago. 
(circa May 2014)

Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”, as if the truth “never happened even while it was happening”.

Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his “updated summary of the record of U.S. foreign policy” which shows that, since 1945, the U.S. has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west ...

... The name of “our” enemy has changed over the years, from communism to Islamism, but generally it is any society independent of western power and occupying strategically useful or resource-rich territory, or merely offering an alternative to U.S. domination.

The leaders of these obstructive nations are usually violently shoved aside, such as the democrats Muhammad Mossedeq in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Salvador Allende in Chile, or they are murdered like Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo. All are subjected to a western media campaign of vilification – think Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, now Vladimir Putin.

Washington’s role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the U.S. is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last “buffer state” bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the U.S. and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler. .....

.... Add the risk of nuclear war, and the question is: why do we tolerate this?



Other Geopolitical Fare:


The United States’ fight to maintain its global hegemony has reached its third stage.
 After the expansion of Nato to the East in violation of Western commitments not to station US weapons in Central Europe, Russia, which cannot defend its huge borders, is under direct threat.
 In violation of its World War II commitments, Washington has put "hardcore nationalists" ("Nazis" in Kremlin terminology) in power in Kiev. They banned their Russian-speaking compatriots from speaking their native language, deprived them of public services, and ultimately bombed those in the Donbass. Russia had no choice but to intervene militarily to put an end to their ordeal.
 The third round is the authoritarian change of energy supply to Western and Central Europe. On the same day, the Baltic Pipeline came into operation, the two Nord Stream pipelines were shut down, while the maintenance of Turkish Stream was interrupted.

This is the most destructive sabotage in history. An act of war against both Russia (51%) and Germany (30%), co-owners of these huge investments, but also against their partners, the Netherlands (9%) and France (9%). For the moment, none of the victims has reacted publicly. ....

........... The act of war committed against Russia, Germany, the Netherlands and France forces us to rethink the events in Ukraine. It is much more important than what has gone before insofar as the United States has attacked its allies. .....

The big losers will be Western Europe and Russia, but also Ukraine, which will have been destroyed only to allow this game of massacre.


Putin and Clausewitz

.... It is often the case that the most consequential men in the world are poorly understood in their time - power enshrouds and distorts the great man. This was certainly the case of Stalin and Mao, and it is equally true of both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Putin in particular is viewed in the west as a Hitlerian demagogue who rules with extrajudicial terror and militarism. This could hardly be farther from the truth.

Almost every aspect of the western caricature of Putin is deeply misguided  ............



It is nice to see that during times of darkness and mass stupidity devoid of moral leadership among so many once-great centers of western civilization, there are some shining examples of greatness at play. Not only are there examples of greatness, but in some instances, these examples have found expression within corridors of actual power which are shaping the contour of humanity’s future.

Such is the case with today’s Russia, which has come a very long way since the dark days of Perestroika when the Russian economy, military, culture, and people were brutally eviscerated by the utopic fantasies of end-of-history ideologues championing the onset of a New World Order.

......... Yet despite this fact, certain geopolitical players among the west believe that it is still 1992, and sincerely believe their outdated New World Order script is still relevant.

As Putin, and leading strategists of the growing multipolar alliance have demonstrated through consistent policies and speeches, such thinking is as delusional as it is dangerous.

Due to the historic nature of the September 30, 2022 speech delivered by the President on the occasion of the accession of the new members of the Russian Federation, and since even now, simply finding Putin’s entire speech whole and without spin is nearly impossible across all corporate media channels, I thought it appropriate to share the video and transcript below so that you can appreciate the full weight of the ideas and message on your own terms. It is fully worth the 40 minutes to take this in.



The recent ceremony of accession of four Ukrainian regions to Russia brought a speech from President Putin that outlined the reasons behind Russia’s current struggles, the character and identify of its foes and, more importantly, laid the groundwork for Russia’s next level of confrontation with the West beyond the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine. In his speech, Putin clearly defined the present fight as a worldwide battle in which Russia plays a leading role against the Deep State that ultimately runs the West and which uses all available tools – including military, economic, cultural, and social – in its attempt to preserve unipolar world domination.

Putin’s words were directed to three distinctive audiences: the collective West, the Global South and Russia. He went back to Middle Ages history to remind the origins and impact of Western resource exploitation and colonialism in the Americas, Asia and Africa through imperialistic wars, racism, and slavery. He touched upon the military exploits of the 20th century led primarily by the US and its allies and its impact in Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War, Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960-70s and its latest failed adventures in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. He also highlighted the dire days of Russia during the 1990s and the Western powers’ attempts to turn it into a dismembered and passive cheap natural resources outlet.

Putin’s message to Russians had nationalistic and religious tones, touching on the defence of traditional family values as a call to arms against the threat caused by dwindling population growth. He also named US monetary printing as one of the key tools used by the Western establishment to achieve its self-preservation and supremacy goals, reminding that paper doesn’t feed nor warm human beings. It would be tempting to see this speech narrowly as just another manifestation of Russia’s position in the big geopolitical battles, but what Putin has done is setting international rivalry in deep historical and cultural terms which have an undoubted appeal across the globe.



Europeans do know bloody well a rough winter is coming for them, but no one has warned them — such as I am doing — that it will be MUCH ROUGHER than what anybody is telling them because not even half of the supposed 90% “reserves” that would sorta get them through this winter okay will be anywhere near available. So it´d be everyone for himself/herself and country vs. country and NATO vs. NATO… on steroids and in a matter of a few weeks Europeans will engage in an HUGE internal brand NEW civilian war amongst themselves scrambling for ´whatever´(food, fuel, heat, etc.) that nobody has yet even thought about… let alone developed continengcy plans.


In the world order now emerging, it is genuinely strong nations that will prevail over those reliant on power alone, and force will have little to do with it.

Vladimir Putin’s speech from the Kremlin last Friday, delivered to the nation and the world as four regions of Ukraine were reintegrated into Russia, was another stunner, in line with numerous others he’s made this year, demonstrating a fundamental turn in the Russian president’s thinking over the past eight months.

The implications of this new perspective warrant careful consideration. Putin has taken to looking forward and seeing something new, and in this he is hardly alone. ....

Putin’s rhetoric has grown markedly sharper from February to last Friday. He has attacked the European Union for its “selfishness” and cowardice, the U.S. for its hegemonic aggression, including the genocide of Native Americans, and the West altogether for the “neocolonial” character of its relations with the non–West. Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, used to refer to Western nations as “our partners.” As of last Friday, yesterday’s partners are Russia’s “enemies.” 

All very grim. Putin has made this turn toward confrontation reluctantly and out of frustration with the West’s obstinate refusal to negotiate the new security order that Europe so obviously needs. He is angry at the spectacle of wasteful violence and prolonged disorder. This is my read. But there is a certain brightness to his outlook that we must not miss amid the bleak, evident animosity. ...

Maybe it is obvious by now that I count the United States the premier example of a nation that is powerful but lacking in strength. There is no anti–American sentiment in this. It is simply because the exercise of power at the expense of strength is more advanced in the U.S., with its excessive corporatization and its excessive dependence on technology as an instrument of power, than anywhere else on earth.

... The paradox: As America determined to make itself a world power, beginning with the Spanish–American War in 1898, it has steadily lost its strength in the way I use the term.

Power, as exercised by the merely powerful, acts primarily in the cause of its own self-preservation. It is thus put to malign purpose, deployed to the detriment of others, and is almost invariably a destructive force. Among its objectives is the destruction of the strengths of others.

Vietnam is a clear case. As they waged war against the Vietnamese people, U.S. forces infamously set about “destroying the village to save it”—that is, to shred the fabric of Vietnamese society so as to defeat it. American forces have since done the same elsewhere — in Syria, for instance, in Libya, in Iraq. You don’t have to approve of any given feature of these societies to recognize that what has been fundamentally at issue was their coherence, those ineffable things that bound them together as one even if it was a fractious unity. This is why we can now speak of these nations as “broken.”

We should consider the Ukraine conflict from this perspective — the wanton, useless destruction, I mean. And we should think about what it is the U.S. most wants to destroy as it presses its campaign to destroy Russia.

Then we can think again about Putin’s speeches over these past months, and the sentiments in them that many other nations—“the majority!”—share. I have long found Putin’s speeches, all available on the Kremlin web site, worth reading: Whatever else one may think of him, he has an excellent grasp of history and the dynamics of international relations. ....


As the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region escalates, experts describe the blood bath as the ‘deadliest war in the world’



Vids of the Week:




Orwellian Fare:


.... Now, a lot people seem to be having trouble understanding or accepting this fact, i.e., the fact that human beings are capable of forcing themselves to believe whatever they need to believe in order to survive or remain in good standing with “normal” society (or whatever social body they are members of and depend on to meet their basic needs). Not pretend to believe, literally believe, the way that religious converts believe, the way we believe whatever we believe today that we didn’t believe ten years ago.

I must say, I find it rather baffling, people’s lack of understanding and acceptance of this fact, as this capability is a fundamental human attribute that has been documented, over and over, throughout the course of human history. It is not some “theory” I just made up. It is how we maintain social cohesion. It is how we socialize our children. It is how armies and university departments work. It is basic part of how social bodies function; conformity is rewarded and non-conformity is punished. There’s nothing new about this phenomenon. People have been conforming to new official “realities” and making themselves believe whatever they have to believe to survive within them for approximately five thousand years.

.... This is what we’ve been watching since March 2020, not mass hypnosis, or mass formation psychosis, but the masses forcing themselves to believe whatever they sensed they needed to believe (or were instructed by the authorities to believe) in order to remain parts of “normal” society and not be demonized by their governments and the media, ostracized by their friends and family, fired from their jobs, segregated, censored, beaten and arrested by the police, and otherwise punished for non-conformity as a new “reality” was manufactured and imposed on societies throughout the world.

And now their “reality” is changing again, or “The Science is evolving,” or whatever, and the absurdities they forced themselves to believe are being exposed as … well, as absurdities, and their fanatical and often fascistic behavior, as it turns out, was based on absolutely nothing.

Many of them couldn’t care less, as their behavior was never “based” on anything other than going along with the herd, and so they have simply transitioned from fanatically hating “the Unvaccinated” to fanatically hating “the Russians,” and fanatically supporting Ukrainian neo-Nazis, and fanatically doing whatever else the GloboCap puppets on their televisions instruct them to fanatically do. However, a significant number of them have retained enough of their critical faculties that being yanked back and forth from “reality” to “reality” is causing them to experience mild cognitive dissonance, and confusion, and shame, or borderline psychosis. ....



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


....... Do you get the message? Are you receiving the messaging loud and clear? Accuse the US of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines and it’s called a conspiracy theory. Accuse Russia of doing the exact same thing and it’s called news.

And of course by pointing out this cartoonish double standard I do not mean to suggest that both theories are equally well-evidenced. One wouldn’t expect them to be in a contest in which one party had their own energy infrastructure sabotaged. 

For example, there’s the fact that Secretary of State Antony Blinken explicitly said that the sabotage of pipelines delivering Russian gas to Germany offers a “tremendous opportunity” to end Europe’s dependency on Russian energy. There’s also the fact that a 2019 Pentagon-commissioned study by the RAND Corporation on how to overextend and weaken Russia explicitly stated that the US would benefit from stopping Nord Stream 2. There’s also the fact that both President Biden and his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland explicitly said that Nord Stream 2 would be brought to an end if Russia invades Ukraine, the fact that the US sanctioned those who built Nord Stream 2, the fact that former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is on record saying the US wants Europeans to be more dependent on North American energy than on pipelines from Russia, the fact that Germans had just been angrily demanding an end to US-led sanctions on Russia and a reopening of Nord Stream gas, the fact that US naval forces were recently conducting unmanned underwater vehicle drills right where the pipelines were attacked, the fact that unmanned underwater vehicles have been found carrying explosive charges near Russian pipelines in the past, the fact that Poland literally just inaugurated a gas pipeline that will transport gas from Norway through Denmark and the Baltic Sea, the fact that US military helicopters were reportedly recorded traveling between the blast points and along the Nord Stream 2 pipeline shortly before the explosions, and the fact that the CIA has a known history of blowing up Russian gas pipelines. ....



Vladimir Putin has signed documents finalizing the Russian annexation of four regions in eastern Ukraine, meaning there’s now a western-backed Ukrainian counteroffensive underway to recapture what Russia officially considers parts of its homeland.

Moscow has made it clear that it will use all weapons systems at its disposal to defend against attacks on territories it claims as its own, which could include nuclear weapons. Depending on if and how that happens and what kind of day all the relevant decision makers are having when it does, there is a distinct possibility that a chain of events could follow which leads to the end of the world.

This happens as Ukraine’s President Zelensky signs a decree officially ruling out the possibility of any peace talks with Putin, who recently publicly requested such talks. The US empire, which has been driving this proxy war from the beginning, is also not currently engaged in peace talks with Moscow. Things are accelerating faster and faster toward the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen, and as far as we know nobody’s got a foot anywhere near the brake pedal. ...



Everyone has lost their fucking mind. Propaganda has made madness look like sanity and sanity look like madness, has normalized cheerleading for nuclear world war and abnormalized calls for de-escalation and detente. It’s truly as bat shit insane as anything could possibly be.

Over and over again we’re being fed the message from the US and its proxies that this game of nuclear chicken can only escalate and never de-escalate. They are lying. They are playing games with all our lives in service of a dark god named unipolarism, and we gain nothing from it.

❖

Mainstream liberals are so fucking stupid that they think the only possible choices with regard to Russia are either (A) handing Putin the entire world on a silver platter or (B) just continually charging toward direct confrontation as though Russia doesn’t have nukes. They don’t know what detente is. At all. They don’t even know it’s a thing, let alone an option here. Like if you ask them they don’t know about the existence of the word or the concept. I’ve been complaining about this since long before the invasion.

Detente used to be a household word. Mainstream politicians campaigned on and debated about it. Now hardly anyone knows it’s even a thing, let alone a real option in dealing with the horrifying escalations between NATO and Russia. This is because the political/media class never tells them.

It’s supposed to be the news media’s job to create an informed populace, but because their real job is propaganda they actually do the opposite. News media never mentioning detente is like a preschool teacher never mentioning sharing or cooperation and just telling kids to fight.






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


.... I know that some people claim the existence of the genders demigirl and demiboy, but I think Sussex and Surrey Police might have discovered a new gender; the demiwit. ...

.......................... What’s important about all of these examples is the backlash. They have all faced some very strong and widespread criticism. Like I have said, and I might be wrong, but I’m beginning to sense a rise in the willingness of people to speak out - and in greater numbers than before.


a self defeating ideology reaches endgame and the world begins to heal

consider the possibility that when the sincere advocates of a movement can no longer be discerned from outlandish parodies of the same ethos that this may represent proof that the movement itself is a joke.

... more so than anything else, what has become manifestly clear is that the best way to parody the woke movement is to see how closely one can mimic it.

.... the lesby account is a masterful collection of sly humor and digs at the wardens of wokedom that draws its savage social criticism from apt imitation. and this has become quite a sizeable movement. and the effects are fascinating.

... the fact that simply saying the same things that they do but cocking a snook while so doing provides not only such cutting critique but evokes such explosive anger from team tantrum that any would DARE to (gasp) repeat the very thing that they themselves have said is too telling to ignore.

........... the great unwokening will, of course, evoke some histrionics and accusation, but it’s coming and nothing can stop it now. there is too much criticism free in the wild and a movement that cannot survive even the expression of its own ideas in open agoras will never withstand this.


No other movement has more to fear from a free marketplace of ideas

............ The “mainstream” trans movement has no way to reject the prosthetic boob shop teacher without rejecting the entirety of its ideology. In other words, the “strawman” version of gender ideology and the “steelman” version of it look exactly alike. Those of us who have not bought into the cult are more inclined to laugh than argue, hence the success of “transphobic” comedians, and few things can be as fatal for a movement that takes itself this seriously.






Long Reads / Big Thoughts:



living loud lives of desperation

.................. 2 key differences between gens Y, Z, and the rest of us:
  1. YZ were raised by rich parents. yeah, i know, not all of them, but we’re talking about averages and middles of bell curves and compared to any past generation they were rich as croesus, especially once we start climbing into the “laptop class.” they were raised in plenty, security, and largesse and this is a challenge for them because, as generation 3 of the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations” cycle, they are generally the ones who blow it and reduce that which their boomer grandparents (imbued with the thrift and determination of their own depression era parents) made and passed on/enabled their gen X offspring with. ...
  2. in addition, they were raised in "everyone gets a prize day" culture. is it shocking that they still want participation trophies? honestly, it would be surprising if they didn’t and this second issue finds a pernicious, amplifying conjunction with the first because if you have no need to strive because your parents can carry you
...... interestingly, this is not just a US phenomenon, it’s global.

the UK has its “failed fledglings” living at home and increasingly saying things like “don’t stigmatize me for failing to launch” while spending their early 30’s in a childhood bedroom posting on facebook support groups for flightless birds.

italy calls it bamboccioni (big babies) and germany calls it “living at hotel mama.” the aussies call it “boomerang children.”

the israelis have gone so far as to declare it a syndrome and name it “entitled dependence”

and it’s not just the west. anyplace with rich boomers has this.

the chinese call it “tang ping” which means “lying flat.” it calls itself a “counterculture” movement, but this seems more justification than legitimate issue.

japan has its hikiomori shut ins (once only teens, now many living at home in the 40’s in a seemingly permanent lifestyle) and their “parasite singles” trend.

but you do not see it in poor countries without a burgeoning upper middle and lower upper class  .....

many in “generation jam-jams” (children and parents alike) are in for some tough sledding and some rough introspection. it’s certainly not the first generation this ever happened to nor is it likely to be the last, but that will not make it fun for either the rising youth or the parents that need to start letting them fall that they may one day learn to run unaided.

but it’s coming.

necessity is a cruel teacher and having not been allowed to take a beating as a kid means they will have to learn as adults. and that will be unfun. but it may also end well.

as old generations recede the new find ways to flourish. it’s happened before. and perhaps it will again.



In the pre-Substack days I registered my complaints with Jonathan Haidt’s belief-in-belief and the concept of the “God-shaped hole.” At the time, I wrote this.
belief in belief is belief in delusion - worse, in other people's delusion. It is one thing to argue that religion is true or is not true. It is another to say “it isn't, incidentally, but go on pretending, it's good for you.” In the inherent condescension of that attitude I see something worse than Christopher Hitchens ever unleashed against the faithful. Whatever Christianity is, it is not worship of the God-shaped hole. Whatever Judaism is, it is not the worship of the God-shaped hole. Whatever Islam is, it is not the worship of the God-shaped hole. And in fact if you take the precepts of those religions at all seriously, you can see praying to the God-shaped hole for what it is: idolatry.
.... If you want to say that belief in the supernatural elements of religion has always been complicated; if you want to say that at least some doubt in the existence of God is common to lived religious practice; if you want to say that it’s all more complicated than I’ve laid it out here – fine. But I continue to find belief-in-belief to be a dead end. I cannot for the life of me understand why you’d engage in religious practice without any belief in the actual transcendent claims on which religion is based rather than simply participating in moral philosophy. It is admittedly difficult to craft a transcendently/objectively true moral philosophy without some conception of a deity that determines right and wrong, but people have been working on it for a couple thousand years. I also understand the desire for the community and fraternity that religion can engender, but surely these are possible without religion



Other QOTW:

Spartacus: It really shows the stunning hypocrisy of the Davos elites, how they sit around discussing carbon emission trackers for their customers. They profited immensely from business practices that discouraged repair and reuse and encouraged wasteful consumption. They created a throwaway society by encouraging consumerism through relentless marketing and brainwashing, and now that they’re sitting on giant piles of money because of it, they want to put the genie of industrialization back in the bottle, pull up the ladder, and deny the rest of civilization access to our share of the enormous wealth that our technology generates.

Kunstler: Adults understand that politics is a crooked business, but through the whole of US history until now filters existed in the public arena that allowed for enough sorting out of truth from untruth to enable the formation of a reality-based consensus — which, in turn, allowed daily life to operate coherently. The Party of Chaos has thrown the kill-switch on that crucial function by corrupting the news business and subverting the new social media. The result is a public culture of pervasive and immersive lying, and a stupendous institutional failure of the courts to correct any of that behavior.

Dr.Fishbones: In addition to the Inflation Reduction Act that doesn't reduce inflation, the Student Debt Forgiveness Act that doesn't forgive student debt, we now have Biden pardoning those in jail for marijuana which doesn't free anyone from jail
This is also in addition to the historic infrastructure bill Biden passed last year that didn't build or repair anything

Slavsquat: Circus performer-turned-Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is begging NATO to launch “preemptive” strikes against Russia—a fun comedy routine that could very possibly turn us all into ash.

JFK: Nuclear powers must avert confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy – or of a collective death-wish for the world.


Satirical Fare:







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