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Sunday, October 16, 2022

2022-10-16

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


Economic and Market Fare:


I learned recently that we have some new subscribers to The 10th Man. So, let’s review the purpose of The 10th Man.
  1. The name comes from the movie World War Z. I’ll skip the background story, but the main idea is that the role of the 10th man is to ask the hard questions when everyone else is in agreement. Right now, everyone can agree: there is a lot of inflation. The 10th man would say: what if there isn’t?
  2. Like most financial newsletters, the goal of The 10th Man is to help you make money. But not in a direct way—I’ll never pitch stocks or other financial instruments. My goal is to get you to think about the markets in a different way. Having said all that, we’re not reflexively contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
  3. To have fun.
What I want to talk about today is this moral panic we’re having about inflation. I chose the words moral panic for a reason—we had a moral panic about obscene song lyrics in the 1990s, and it turned out to be nothing. I suspect this will turn out to be nothing as well.
I’ll give you two charts: the first is a chart of food inflation, which is turning sharply lower. The conventional wisdom is that food inflation leads to broader inflation.

I’ll give you two charts: the first is a chart of food inflation, which is turning sharply lower. The conventional wisdom is that food inflation leads to broader inflation.

The second chart is one of job openings, which is cratering as the tight labor market loosens up sharply.

These charts are only a sample size of two, but these are highly deflationary signals. ...


Roberts: Deflation Will Become The Problem When "Something Breaks"

.... While “high inflation rates” are certainly problematic for the economy, as it creates demand destruction, the more considerable risk remains “financial instability,” which is “deflationary.” As we will discuss, deflation remains a more significant threat for the Fed as it coincides with wealth destruction, further undermining consumer confidence.

Inflation Is Unsustainable
Inflationary pressures can be a “good thing” when they correspond with strong economic growth and productivity. However, when price inflation rises faster than wages and increases debt servicing costs on heavily levered households, the resulting liquidity contraction triggers economic recessions.

Such was a point made by Michael Wilson of Morgan Stanley, stating:
“In our view, such tightness is unsustainable because it will lead to intolerable economic and financial stress.”
The chart below shows the three major components that comprise inflation:
  1. Commodity prices that reflect real economic activity,
  2. Wages that allow for increases in spending and support for higher prices; and,
  3. The Velocity Of Money shows the demand for money through the economic system.
When we combine these three components into a composite inflation index, we can see that high inflation rates precede recessions and deflationary periods.

.... The problem for the Fed is additional rate hikes will exacerbate the disinflationary processes already at work in the economy. As such, when the eventual recession occurs, demand destruction will likely be more significant than anticipated. A brief review of previous inflationary periods suggests such will be the case.


The global economy is deteriorating. It's time for the Fed to do the right thing: slow down or even better pause its interest rate hikes. It's going too big, too fast.

Key Takeaways
  • Downward pressure on future U.S. inflation is mounting from many sources.
  • The U.S. recession will likely be mild; Europe’s severe; China’s growth stagnant.
  • Why will it likely be milder in the United States? The strong labor market.
  • Fedspeak is starting, albeit too slowly, to be open about the global risks.
.......... I am a hopeful person. I believe the Fed will do the right thing, though the window is closing fast for it to matter. They must slow down, if not stop now.  ........







Newsflash: bank runs can actually happen in market economies and when they do, they do real economic damage. Yup! Economists proved this to their satisfaction in the ‘80s. Not the 1880s, but the 1980s. That was the moment when three intellectual pioneers found a way of fitting banks and bank failures into a workhorse economic model and specified a channel by which the failure of banks raised the cost of credit intermediation. And that matters because, “as we all know”, intermediating between savers and borrowers is what banks do.

I’m not normally into philistinism. I enjoy intellectual activity and game-playing for their own sake. In such an exercise, self-limitation, playing with rules, seeing how far a limited model will go, are all part of the point. But that activity should be pursued with a sense of modesty of purpose and a clear acknowledgement of the limits of the exercise one is engaged in.

What this year’s economics “Nobel” prize does is the opposite. It has the effrontery actually to celebrate one of the weakest dimensions of modern macroeconomic thinking - its extraordinarily limited ability to grasp the macrofinancial instability of modern capitalism. Rather than challenging the dogged refusal of the economics mainstream to take seriously thinkers who face the essential important of finance and its dangers for the modern world head on, it flaunts the tendency of the mainstream to ignore them. .....

......... If you follow the Mehrling-Kindleberger line, if the Sveriges Riksbank Prize committee had actually wanted to reward economist who have enabled us to understand the dynamics of the modern global financial system and its interconnections with the real economy, the prize should have gone to the team at the BIS going back to the William White era and the academic economists associated with them today, most notably Hyun Song Shin.



..... David’s vision enabled me to see our modern financial institutions as a continuity, and a perversion, of that quintessential human trait, of keeping track of our debts. What we have now is an institution that wishes to create more such debts, for its own profit. Whereas religions extolled the virtue of not being in debt—”neither a borrower nor a lender be“—supported Jubilees (Hudson 2018), and railed against the practice of usury, banks encourage the creation of debt, champion the creditor over the debtor, and have pushed interest-based financing into every corner of our lives.

This aspect of modern society is what gave David’s historical detective work such contemporary significance. Those of us who understand the role of private debt in capitalism—and David was one of that tiny band—know that it is the explosion of private debt, and not of government debt, that has caused almost all of capitalism’s periodic financial crises (Vague 2019). And yet in contrast with reality, mainstream economics ignores private debt, with its fiction that banks are “mere intermediaries” who take in the deposits of savers and lend them out to borrowers, and rails against government debt.

The former is a fallacy, the latter is a farce. Banks are not intermediaries between savers and borrowers, but are instead the originators of both debt and debt-based money. The government does not borrow from the public when its spending exceeds taxation revenue, but in fact creates money for the public which, unlike credit money, does not come with a debt obligation for the public itself.

But because this fallacy and this farce are believed by much of the public, and most politicians and journalists, skyrocketing levels of private debt have gone unnoticed, while their demonising of government debt has led to far too little fiat-based money being created—which further drives the public into private debt.

I thought I would always have David’s voice to join with mine, Michael Hudson’s, and the small band of monetary realists, in fighting against this fallacy and this farce. His sudden death in 2020 was, for me personally, the most shocking event in that systemically shocking year. We’ll soldier on regardless, but we’ll soldier less well without him, and with far less panache and wit than we would have done, had he continued to be one of our number.



...... The antagonism to Xi and the current leadership is less to do with the lack of democracy and one-party rule in China – the Western pundits and international agencies seldom mentioned that in their past analyses of China before Xi took over.  The strong antagonism now is really to do with two things: 1) under Xi, China’s economic policy has emphasised state control and a reduction of the sway of the capitalist sector; and 2) under Xi, China is resisting to being contained and squeezed by US imperialism in its escalating attempt to stop China’s progress as a major rival in trade, technology and global influence. ........

.......... But China opted to save lives over economic expansion.  Of course, Western analysts claim that China’s lockdown ‘zero COVID’ policy is more to do with controlling the population by an autocratic regime – yet most opinion surveys in the past have shown broad support for the policy among the population, although it is true that ‘lockdown fatigue’ is beginning to have an impact, mainly because there is no democratic decision-making on health policy, which is just imposed from above.

The other reason that China’s economic growth has slipped this year is the general slowdown towards a slump in the rest of the world. The major capitalist economies are stuck in supply-chain congestion, weak investment expansion and now rising interest rates and inflation that threaten outright global recession.  ....



Vid:

with references to Rosie, Lacy Hunt, even Neil Howe:




Tweet of the Week:


Charts: 
1:






Bubble Fare:

Crypto's first token created a culture and then a monster.



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


The anti-"woke investing" movement was not created by financial experts. It was created by two of the fossil fuel industry's most notorious climate disinformers.

Anti-ESG proponents want to stop corporations from following environmentally and socially conscious investing principles, commonly referred to as Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) principles. They say companies are prioritizing “left-wing” goals over the financial interests of businesses and their employees, and should be prevented by law from doing so.

This movement has gained a massive following in the last six months. Elon Musk supports it, as do billionaire investors Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman, who are are backing a new financial firm dedicated to anti-ESG investing. .........

......... It may be more sophisticated today, but the anti-ESG movement is the same as it ever was: a political effort to delay climate action led by fossil fuel industry propagandists. It follows the classic playbook of climate disinformation by trying to “both sides” the idea of climate risk. But Witold Henisz, the director of the Wharton School’s ESG program, put it best: “Climate risk is investment risk. There is no credible other side, only an ideological opposition cynically seeking a wedge issue for upcoming political campaigns.”

“Proponents of climate science and more sustainable investing need to plan and execute their counterattack,” he added. “Silence in the face of such an attack is complicity. Which side are you on?”




The key to averting cataclysmic events, such as pandemics, climate change, and mass extinction of species, lies partly in what’s on our plates.



Sci Fare:




In November of 1660, at Gresham College in London, an invisible college of learned men held their first meeting after 20 years of informal collaboration. They chose their coat of arms: the royal crown’s three lions of England set against a white backdrop. Their motto: “Nullius in verba,” or “take no one’s word for it.” Three years later, they received a charter from King Charles II and became what was and remains the world’s preeminent scientific institution: the Royal Society.

Three and a half centuries later, in July of 2021, even respected publications began to grow weary of a different, now constant refrain: “Trust the science.” It was a mantra everyone was supposed to accept, repeated again and again, ad nauseum. ........

................... Turning from the past to the future, we now face the worrying prospect that the union of science and the state may have weakened science itself. Some time ago, commentators raised the specter of scientific slowdown, and more recent analysis has provided further justification for these fears. Why is science slowing? To put it simply, it may be difficult to have science be both authoritative and exploratory at the same time.

When scientists are meant to be authoritative, they’re supposed to know the answer. When they’re exploring, it’s okay if they don’t. Hence, encouraging scientists to reach authoritative conclusions prematurely may undermine their ability to explore—thereby yielding scientific slowdown. Such a dynamic may be difficult to detect, since the people who are supposed to detect it might themselves be wrapped up in a premature authoritative consensus.

Thus, from an unfixed flaw in the foundation, the surprise accumulation of authority and premature acceptance of that authority, science completed the inversion of its original ethos—and nullius in verba became “trust the science.” ..........



Pics of the Week:


click link for more:






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:

World-renowned physician Gabor Maté’s new book examines the profound physical and psychological harms of “normal” capitalist society, which makes a small minority very well-off while sowing illness and despair on a vast scale.


The American public was subjected to a campaign right out of the Soviet playbook designed to obfuscate the Biden family corruption.

Near the end of the 2020 presidential campaign there was an October Surprise. A shocking and provocative story that could potentially alter the outcome. That was, of course, Hunter Biden’s laptop.

This report shows the full extent of a successful censorship and disinformation campaign by the Left that directly influenced the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

In the final months of the 2020 race an amazing revelation of corruption and actual crimes by Hunter and Joe Biden came to light. The New York Post ran an exposé of emails from a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden at a repair shop. They showed evidence the Bidens were involved in taking money from foreign entities and providing access to the U.S. government.

At a minimum, these are likely felony violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and perhaps also the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). 

Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate and the entire country was about to decide whether he was suitable to serve as president. This story was highly relevant for citizens trying to make an informed voting decision. Voters were denied the opportunity to see and evaluate this information. Worse yet, they were subjected to a calculated disinformation campaign designed to discredit it. This project has identified the conspirators, their strategy, their actions, and the chilling effect they had on our representative democracy. Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. .....................

........... The definitive book on Cold War era information warfare from our Communist foes is Dezinformatsia: Active Measures in Soviet Strategy. In that book, disinformation is defined as “false, incomplete, or misleading information that is passed, fed, or confirmed to a targeted individual, group, or country.” 

The American public was subjected to a campaign right out of the Soviet playbook designed to obfuscate the Biden family corruption. It was concocted and deployed by a loosely connected conspiracy of the media, current and former government officials, the Biden campaign, and the social media tech companies. As soon as the story broke October 19, 2020 virtually every major and subsidiary media outlet reported on it with negative sentiment using one of two major themes: ....




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



When the COVID-19 vaccines came out, most of my colleagues drank the Kool-Aid and scrambled to be the first ones to make it to the mass vaccination site (healthcare workers got first access to the vaccine). My spouse and I were two of the only exceptions at our facility.

Later, when our supervisor (also a physician) realized that we had not been vaccinated, a series of meetings were arranged to address our “vaccine hesitancy.” A few things stood out to me throughout this process:

•Numerous major issues jumped out at me with Pfizer’s NEJM paper, but all of the physicians I worked with (who on a daily basis patronizingly reminded all of us of their competency for appraising the scientific literature), became fixated on Pfizer’s “95% effective claim” and were completely blind to the paper’s methodological shortcomings.

 •At various times, on account of our differing assessment, both of us were informed that it was immensely arrogant on our part to assume our colleagues had incorrectly appraised the evidence and that by having a differing assessment, suggesting that we knew better than all of them.

 •Every single point we cited was subsequently proven to be true (hence why I preserved our correspondence).

Due to the politically charged nature of the topic, we tried to be as non-confrontational as possible and only critique the least controversial aspects of the vaccine (e.g., I was nearly certain there was massive fraud in the trials, there would be serious issues with vaccine efficacy and there would be significant autoimmune and cancer issues for the vaccinated). Since discussing the “controversial” areas could label us an “anti-vaxxers” and cast doubt on our ability to accurately appraise this paper the most defensible areas we instead mentioned were as follows:

•The vaccine had not been tested for fertility effects in women of childbearing age.

•The reported benefits were minuscule, 119 had to be vaccinated to prevent a symptomatic case of COVID-19, e.g. a sore throat, 2711 had to be vaccinated to prevent a “severe” outcome, and 44,060 (split evenly between vaccine and placebo) person trial was too small to determine how many needed to be vaccinated to prevent a death from COVID-19. Considering that over half of the trial’s vaccine recipients experienced symptomatic side effects from vaccination, it was unclear if the risk-to-benefit ratio justified vaccination.

 •This technology is experimental and the clinical trial is not scheduled to finish until 2023, so it will not be possible to fully assess the risks and benefits of the vaccine until then.

•The vaccine was not tested for its ability to prevent transmission, so we cannot know if patients will benefit from their doctor being vaccinated.

All of these points were of course ridiculed and dismissed, but were sufficient for us to be left alone provided we agreed not to share our hesitancy with our patients (at this time Biden’s mandates had not yet been enacted). When I found particularly interesting about this process was that we were repeatedly told the fact that the vaccines prevent infection was proof that they would also reduce transmission. This statement illustrated a fundamental lack of understanding of immunology but was extremely common for me to encounter throughout the vaccine rollout.

It was also not helped by the fact the health authorities insisted the vaccine stopped transmission despite it being well-known the vaccines were not tested to evaluate transmission ......

...... Put differently, I was able to understand how much of the public relations (propaganda) campaign for the COVID-19 vaccines would play out because I had witnessed the exact same scams be pulled countless times in the past with other ineffective vaccinations. 

... A common strategy in propaganda is moving goalposts, as the target ultimately being aimed for is something the public would initially never agree upon. As a result, the first thing that is pushed on the public is something that at least on the surface seems justifiable but is then gradually shifted to the originally unacceptable goal

...... The military-industrial complex’s propaganda has many similarities to the medical-industrial complex’s propaganda and hence is quite valuable to study when attempting to understand what happened with COVID-19.

.................................. In the case of COVID-19, vaccine efficacy appears to drop from the time of vaccination until it becomes negative. 

The solution to this problem has been to repeatedly deploy boosters before the vaccine efficacy can become negative. Further complicating the issue, as best as I can tell from reviewing the preliminary evidence, the rate of decline in vaccine efficacy appears to accelerate with each successive vaccination (while the rates of severe adverse reactions simultaneously increase).



I like to think of myself as a reasonable person. I’m a misanthrope, I don’t like humanity as a collective, but I don’t carry ill will towards individuals. I wouldn’t recommend an individual to jump off a cliff, I’d rather see them sell their car, stop flying and stop eating meat. For me this means that if I thought to myself that I had offered you bad advice in regards to the ongoing SARS-COV-2 pandemic, I would tell you so. ...

...... Before explaining the problem with their line of reasoning, I just want you to take a look with me at the outcome of a natural experiment: Which country is better off? A country that does everything “right”, or a country which allowed SARS-COV-2 to spread through the population and focused on protecting those most at risk? We can measure this by looking at cumulative excess mortality. ...

.... Again, I like to think of myself as an intellectually honest person. From march 2020 onwards, I have been telling you that this virus is a nothingburger, that you should not fear it and should not implement the kind of totalitarian technocratic measures we saw implemented around the world. Had Sweden now been at the top of the charts in regards to cumulative excess mortality, I like to think I would be writing a post now, explaining that I was wrong, that you do need to painstakingly avoid running into this virus.

But when I look at the data we now have available, I can’t help but conclude that I was right. For elderly people in nursing homes with a few months of life expectancy left, SARS-COV-2 is intrinsically very dangerous. For the population as a whole, it only becomes dangerous when we engage in very stupid unprecedented experiments, like mass vaccination, wearing masks and social distancing. These experiments disrupt the natural balance that exists between humans and the community of respiratory pathogens that infect us. That’s what kills and injures people. 

Of course not all measures that were implemented actually do much of anything. The masks that people were forced to wear are generally not very effective at stopping people from getting infected by respiratory viruses. But if you continue with the experiment long enough, if you move to N95’s, or those weird cyberpunk things the Zero COVID wokies wear these days, along with goggles for your eyes so you end up looking like an early 2010’s cybergoth at a German industrial dance club, you should probably be capable of preventing yourself from getting infected by any viruses at all. And that’s a terrible thing, not a good thing.

Your muscles respond to mild injuries through overrepair. This is the science behind weight-lifting. Small tears in your muscles lead your body to overcompensate and you end up with bigger stronger muscles as a result. Of course this only works if you progressively challenge your muscles with bigger weights, at the limits of what your muscles can handle. The kind of weights an experienced bodybuilder uses would merely lead to painful injuries for a novice, rather than to muscle hypertrophy.

Your bones are similar. The bones are strengthened through exposure to pressure beyond what they would normally experience. The body adjusts to such exposure. With most drugs that people expose themselves to you also see compensation, the body adjusts itself to be able to cope with such insults. Alcoholics, opioid addicts, teenagers who take Benadryl, almost every drug has effects on multiple tissues in the body, that adjust to be able to cope with the change to their environment: Enzymes that process these drugs are increased in the liver, receptors affected are downregulated, etcetera.

The effect even exists for strokes. We call it ischemic preconditioning. ...

And so I wish to ask you: If we see this effect in just about every tissue, why would the tissues affected by SARS-COV-2 be radically different? With the evidence we have available, we can say they’re not. As people living in industrialized societies, we’re able to survive outbreaks of respiratory pathogens that would decimate uncontacted hunter-gatherer tribes. The reason we are able to survive such outbreaks is because we are constantly exposed to a wide variety of other respiratory pathogens: The milder insults set us up to be able to live through bigger insults. ....

...  SARS-COV-2, whether you like it or not, is here to stay. Anyone who wants to have a normal social life, will have to be able to live through an infection from this virus.

The sort of measures that would reduce transmission of SARS-COV-2, like UVC lighting and high quality masks, can not stop the transmission of SARS-COV-2, without also stopping the transmission of other benign respiratory viruses. That’s a dangerous and harmful thing. It has the effect of making people more susceptible to severe disease, upon being infected by SARS-COV-2.


********* Spartacus: Humans as Bioreactors
How DARPA and Moderna pioneered the idea behind mRNA vaccines

Nucleic Acid Vaccines
A nucleic acid vaccine is a vaccine that uses gene delivery methods, such as lipid nanoparticles or viral vectors, to deliver some quantity of either DNA or RNA into a cell. The cell’s own machinery, in the form of RNA polymerases and ribosomes, uses these nucleic acids as instructions to synthesize proteins. In the case of a nucleic acid vaccine, the protein in question is usually one of the structural proteins of a virus, with the aim of generating an antibody response against that specific protein, but this isn’t the only type of product that nucleic acid transfection can produce. Gene transfection into cells can, in fact, make those cells produce any kind of protein, with the right instructions, including monoclonal antibodies, designer receptors, anything imaginable.

In the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, the media and the medical establishment tried getting around this by arguing that since the vaccines did not change the recipient’s DNA, that meant that they weren’t gene therapy. The introduction of foreign nucleic acids into the body to generate foreign proteins is, by definition, gene therapy, regardless of whether or not the subject’s own genes are changed by it. DNA and RNA are genetic material, and if the immune system catches a cell producing non-human proteins, some seriously bad things will happen to that cell.

Unlike a virus, which only binds to specific host factors expressed by specific cell lines and is endocytosed in those specific cells, cationic lipids, like the LNPs used in mRNA vaccines, are capable of transfecting basically any type of cell with instructions to make proteins. LNPs were investigated for many years as a means of delivering Alzheimer’s drugs to the brain, because they readily bypass the blood-brain barrier.

When the thing being delivered is a toxin, like SARS-CoV-2 Spike, however, there are serious consequences. ......

There has been a major push for the adoption of nucleic acid vaccine tech in prior years, largely hidden from the public eye. In order to begin tracing it out, one must simply perform date range searches for the years prior to 2020, for nucleic acid vaccines. The cheerleaders of this technology immediately reveal themselves .........

Again and again, the same properties are touted; easy, rapid, cost-effective development and manufacture. Plug in a gene sequence for the targeted antigen and away you go. ......

......... There is an extensive paper trail, here, one that shows that Moderna is just another front in the Biodefense Mafia. The media, with few exceptions, are largely silent on this matter.


  1. Irish researchers studied 309 babies born in the first three months of lockdown
  2. Parents were surveyed for ten behavioral milestones at their first birthday
  3. Results were compared against 2,000 babies born between 2008 and 2011
  4. Pandemic babies were less likely to be speaking, pointing or waving by this age
....... A study in Britain found that many children entering elementary school have severely underdeveloped verbal skills, with many are unable to even say their own name.

According to speech therapists, mask wearing has caused a 364% increase in patient referrals of babies and toddlers.

Another study revealed how mean IQ scores of young children born during the pandemic have tumbled by as much as 22 points while verbal, motor and cognitive performance have all suffered as a result of lockdown.

A study published in the Royal Society Open Science journal found that lockdowns in the UK caused around 60,000 children to suffer clinical depression.

Figures show that 400,000 British children were referred to mental health specialists last year for things like eating disorders and self-harm.

Education experts have asserted that forcing schoolchildren to wear face masks has caused long lasting psychological trauma.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Pamela Everett Goodman: “I knew, while I was standing in the emergency room at mount Sinai on 59 th street that the shot had killed him. Benjamin sent us a screenshot with his card and lot number at 4 pm on 03/13/21. He said he had a terrible headache. We were calling and calling him to go to the ER and he refused. He said it was normal. I was screaming into the phone that it wasn’t. He suffered horribly. It wasn’t like he just went to bed and didn’t wake up. We were on the phone with 911 while they were doing CPR in his apt and we were on the road into the city. The doctors didn’t even know what VAERS was. We had to beg for the autopsy and the results for 6 months.”




CO-VIDs of the Week:




Anecdotal Fare:


Meet Michael Turner MD.

Dr. Turner is a graduate of Stanford University, Harvard Medical School, and The Mayo Clinic.

He believed in vaccines. But he doesn’t anymore.

He documented his COVID vaccine transformation from pure blue pill (trusting the narrative) to pure red pill (realizing he was duped) in this short article he posted to his Substack: ...

.... Like Dr. Paul Marik, once Dr. Turner transitioned from trusting the experts to trusting the data, he was able to find the truth.

Please watch this 1 minute video and read his transformation story: ....


Meanwhile, the CDC and "our free press," in league with blinded doctors, are doing all they can to HIDE the truth that's staring everybody in the face

How Cancer Deaths From the COVID Jabs Are Being Hidden
  • Analysis of U.S. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) data suggests the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been filtering and redesignating cancer deaths as COVID deaths since April 2021 to eliminate the cancer signal
  • The signal is being hidden by swapping the underlying cause of death with main cause of death
  • Uncontrollable turbo-charged cancers the medical establishment had never seen before only started to occur after the rollout of the COVID jabs
  • Before it was manipulated to eliminate the safety signal, data from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) showed cancer rates among military personnel and their families tripled after the rollout of the shots
  • After the rollout of the COVID jabs in 2021, cancer patients have gotten younger, with the largest increase occurring among 30- to 50-year-olds, tumor sizes are dramatically larger, multiple tumors in multiple organs are becoming more common, and recurrence and metastasis are increasing

Doug sacrificed his life in order to send the world an important message: DO NOT VACCINATE. It's not worth it. It could cost you your life.



COVID Corporatocracy Fare:

The cartel knows exactly what buttons to push to get you to do what they want



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


Needless to say, that massive missile strikes by Russia continue all over 404 and there are reports of massive explosions and power outages in Nikolaev and other places, plus Kiev remains to be targeted. And, as was expected, all VSU attempts to perform "offensives" have been repelled with massive losses for VSU, including at Kremennaya and Svatovo (in Russian), but NATO--let's drop the pretense here--will try to throw as much cannon fodder at Russian formations as possible because they need something, like "breakthrough" in some sectors, because the Midterms are coming and Russians amassing troops for obvious things. Time is running out. 

So, there are signs that the realization of grim reality begins to descend on Washington D.C.



The terrorist attack against the Kerch Bridge continues to resonate and make waves throughout all of Russian society, from top to bottom. It’s like the Russian 9/11. Which I personally find a little surprising, since this attack was expected, predicted, and predictable. Well, I reckon even when a blow is expected, it still comes as a shock, sometimes. Which is why I never took up boxing as a sport.

Anyhow, Bandera may have bought himself a few hours of wicked euphoria, but at what price? I think at any time in the course of this conflict, up until that point, he could have negotiated his way out of this pickle, and even managed to keep Odessa for himself. But now Russians are coming around to the realization that they themselves (=Russia) can never be safe, so long as the Ukrainian entity has any access to the sea. ........

............. No, the real solution is a more radical plan: The storming, and taking, of “Mother” Odessa herself. Not an easy task, obviously. But as part of a much broader counter-offensive. By taking Odessa, the Russians would, once and for all, cut Ukraine off from all of its ports, turning it into a land-locked country. And would also give Russia a stranglehold on Ukrainian trade and commerce, going in and out of the port of Odessa. The loss of Odessa would be, furthermore, a colossal economic and psychological shock for Ukraine.



.... Whereas in the past, going back six months or more, I had reported on the open contempt which leading and highly responsible Russian academics from university circles and think tanks were showing for the American political leadership in their statements on the political talk shows, this contempt has moved into an actionable phase, by which I mean that serious, God-fearing Russians are so furious with the rubbish propaganda coming out of Washington, repeated with bullhorns in Europe that if given the chance they would personally “press the button” and unleash nuclear attacks on the United States and Britain, in that order notwithstanding the possibility, even probability of a return strike, which, however enfeebled, would be devastating to their own country. That is to say, deterrence as a policy is fast losing its psychological impact on the Russian side of the argument. ....

...... As we have seen from even before the launch of the ‘special military operation,’ Russian talk programs identify by name individuals in the Biden team whose outstanding stupidity, obtuseness and rank ignorance they find unbearable, with the likes of Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Lloyd Austin among those coming in for special mention. We are left with the impression that when Biden calls in his advisers to the Oval Office, he, senile dimwit that he is, is the bright light in the room. The Russians conclude from this that they have no one to negotiate with.

Now the naming of idiots in high places carries over to all discussion of European Union and British leaders. The denunciation of incompetence, rank stupidity and, yes, neo-colonialist or fascist mindsets among European leaders ......

..... If I may draw any positive conclusions from the otherwise bleak analysis in the foregoing, they are that Russia is successfully resisting massive U.S. and E.U. pressures, and that the world is realigning before our eyes in a more multi-polar and democratic direction.  And yet, the fears of miscalculations on one side or another in this tense and unparalleled contest mean Armageddon constantly threatens in the background.



Elon Musk has expressed concerns over a controversial website that lists supposed enemies of Kiev, amid claims that his own name briefly appeared on Mirotvorets following his threats to cut funding for Starlink satellite internet services actively used by the Ukrainian troops. 

“Is this list real? What’s the URL?” the SpaceX CEO tweeted in response to independent journalist Eva Karene Bartlett, who on Friday shared a viral screenshot that claims to show his persona added to the notorious database. 

“I’ve been speaking and writing about this list for years, after being placed on it in 2019, but now that Musk is on it, after Roger Waters and others, perhaps the ‘peacemaker’ list might itself be killed…,” Bartlett wrote.





QOTW:

MacGregor: "Remember, we spent eight years building this army [in Ukraine] for the sole purpose of attacking Russia. That is what it was designed for. That is why the Russians attacked'.



Other Geopolitical Fare:

A simple comparison between western attitudes to Israeli terror and Palestinian resistance versus Russian terror and Ukrainian resistance reveals massive hypocrisy in the West

........... Western news at the moment is a litany of these double standards and legal and ethical contradictions – and yet barely anyone seems to notice. 

........... There is nothing new about these double standards. They are entrenched in western thinking, based on a profoundly racist, colonial worldview – one that sees “the West” as the good guys and everyone else as morally compromised, or irredeemably evil, if they refuse to bow to western dictates.

.... The ugly truth is that westerners dwell permanently inside their own bubble of disinformation, one puffed up by their leaders and the media, that allows them to imagine themselves as the good guys – whatever the evidence actually proves. 


********** Pilkington: How Russia Views America

... If the last few months have shown that we in the West have misapprehended Russia, then perhaps it is because we have misunderstood how Russia, in turn, perceives the West, particularly the United States. Perhaps Russia is attuned to weaknesses that the West has for too long failed to address.

In assessing Russia’s view of the West, most commentators look to President Putin’s “Munich Speech,” delivered in 2007. That speech was a protest against Western—and especially American—hegemony over the world order. In it, Putin said, “One state, and first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way.” The Western response was, effectively, “what are you going to do about it?”—which was understandable, at the time, given the way the deck was stacked. But the deck has been shuffled since then. Putin’s speech is now fifteen years old, and a lot has happened in those fifteen years.

In fact, the Russian view of the West has changed dramatically. In 2007, the Russians were annoyed at what they viewed as Western overexpansion, but they were making this case as a smaller country pleading with a unipolar hegemon. Today, however, the Russians view the West—and especially America—as being in a state of terminal, ever-accelerating decline. ......

...... Martyanov traces the failures of U.S. military technologies back to the nature of the U.S. military-industrial complex. He reminds readers that this is effectively a for-profit enterprise, and so what ends up being built is not always what is best in terms of defense capabilities, but rather what will make the most money for commercial actors. ....

..... A few years ago, it would have been fashionable to dismiss this sort of materialist analysis as old fashioned. Pundits argued that the growing weight of the service sector in the American economy was a good thing, not a bad thing, a sign of progress, not decline. But today, with supply chains collapsing and inflation raging, these fashionable arguments look more and more like self-serving bromides every day. ...

....... Martyanov believes that America’s extreme meritocrats vastly over­estimate their capabilities. This is because, rather than focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the country they rule, they have been taught since birth to focus on themselves. They believe that they just need to maximize their own personal accomplishments and the good of the country will emerge as if by magic. This has led inevitably to the rise of what Martyanov characterizes as a classic oligarchy. Such an oligarchy, he argues, purports to be meritocratic but is actually the opposite. A proper meritocracy allows the best and the brightest to climb up its ranks. But an oligarchy with a meritocratic veneer simply allows those who best play the game to rise. Thus, the meritocratic claims become circular: you climb the ladder because you play the game; the game is meritocratic because those who play it are by definition the best and the brightest. Effectively, for Martyanov, the American elite does not select for intelligence and wisdom, but rather for self-assured­ness and self-interestedness.

This creates an echo chamber in the halls of power. The elite incentive structure does not allow for self-correction when error is detected. Rather, when mistakes are made, they are ignored and forgot­ten... Ensuring that the mechanism securing elite individual gain is upheld and insulated from criticism is more important than ensuring that it works. As with late Communism, most effort is expended on producing self-reinforcing narratives that justify the sys­tem itself, and there is little energy left for addressing genuine problems. 

Martyanov posits that this is how American leaders are viewed in much of the rest of the world, where he contends that leaders are selected along more genuinely meritocratic lines. “American [public] intellectuals come across as feeble and unconvincing, if not laughably incompetent and trite,” he writes, “when measured against the best minds from Russia, China, Iran or many other regions of the globe.” .....



Orwellian Fare:


For students of official propaganda, mind control, emotional coercion, and other insidious manipulation techniques, the rollout of the New Normal has been a bonanza. Never before have we been able to observe the application and effects of these powerful technologies in real-time on such a massive scale.

In a little over two and a half years, our collective “reality” has been radically revised. Our societies have been radically restructured. Millions (probably billions) of people have been systematically conditioned to believe a variety of patently ridiculous assertions, assertions based on absolutely nothing, repeatedly disproved by widely available evidence, but which have nevertheless attained the status of facts. An entire fictitious history has been written based on those baseless and ridiculous assertions. It will not be unwritten easily or quickly. ...

... The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it. .....



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


We’re being driven toward nuclear war on the completely fictional claim that Putin is a Hitler-like megalomaniac who’s just invading countries completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and won’t stop invading and conquering until he’s stopped by force.

The news media aren’t telling people about the western aggressions which led to this war. They’re not telling people the US is keeping this war going with the stated goal of weakening Russia and is rejecting peace talks and refusing to push for peace. All people are being told is that Putin is another Hitler who won’t listen to reason and only understands violence. The world’s two nuclear superpowers are being pushed closer and closer to direct military confrontation based on a complete fiction which omits mountains of facts.

To participate in this madness is indefensible. It is indefensibly immoral to foist a fictional version of events upon a trusting populace in order to manufacture consent for more and more aggressive acts of brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. These people are depraved.

❖

Don’t let anyone tell you your criticisms of US warmongering make no difference; if they didn’t, the empire wouldn’t work so hard to dissuade you from making them. They work so hard to manufacture public consent for their agendas because they absolutely require that consent.

An entire globe-spanning empire rests on our closed eyelids. Depends on keeping us in a propaganda-induced coma. Circulating ideas and information which discredit and dispute that propaganda poses a direct threat to that empire. That’s what all the censorship of dissent is about.

Is your one tweet, video or public demonstration going to bring the empire crashing down? Of course not. But it will spread awareness by that much. And all positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness. You’re nudging us all toward awakening to whatever extent you help expand awareness of truth and reality.

We can’t be the Hollywood hero who single-handedly decapitates the machine, but we can all collectively throw sand in its gears, making it harder and harder for it to function. That’s what disrupting the imperial propaganda machine accomplishes, because that machine depends on propaganda. The weakest part of an empire that’s held together by lies and manipulation is its lies and manipulations; that’s why it’s such an aggressively protected aspect of its power. And it happens to be the one part that anyone with a voice can attack, and attack effectively.

The nightmare scenario for our rulers is the same as the nightmare scenario for every ruler throughout history: that the masses will get sick of their rule and use the power of their numbers to get rid of them. That’s exactly what the propaganda matrix is designed to prevent.

One aspect of this struggle that is a bit like a Hollywood movie is that it kind of is a struggle between light and darkness, because the empire depends on keeping its activities obfuscated and unseen while we’re all working to make its machinery visible and transparent. That’s why Assange is in prison. It’s also why internet censorship keeps ramping up, why propaganda is getting more and more blatant, and why online discussion is swarmed by astroturf trolling ops. Those in power are working against the people to keep things dark and unseen.



........... Of course we cannot conclusively prove that Putin isn’t giving his soldiers sex drugs to help them rape Ukrainians more efficiently. We cannot conclusively prove that Ukrainian spies aren’t sneaking across the border and injecting Russian babies with HIV either, but we don’t treat bizarre, nonsensical and completely unevidenced claims as true just because they cannot be definitively proven false. Especially when those exact claims have been used to advance depraved power agendas in the past in instances that remain completely unevidenced.

....... As we’ve discussed previously, the U.S. and its proxies have an extensive history of using atrocity propaganda, for example in the infamous “taking babies from incubators” narrative that was circulated in the 1990 false Nayirah testimony which helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War. Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.

Western mass media are proving time and time again that there is no accusation against Russia that they will not promote as factual news reporting, no matter how evidence-free and ridiculous. The fact that they’re going to the well and recycling old atrocity propaganda illustrates this even more lucidly.

If we were being told the truth about this war, we wouldn’t be hammered with blatant atrocity propaganda by so-called “news” outlets. We wouldn’t be subjected to ever escalating censorship of voices who criticize the western empire’s role in this war. We wouldn’t be swarmed by pro-NATO online trolling operations founded by actual neo-Nazis.

How are people not yet tired of having their intelligence insulted?



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

Nearly a quarter of girls between 12 and 16 are intentionally injuring themselves, mostly with knives and razor blades. The rate is even higher among teens from upper-middle class, highly educated families. Those who self-harm are six times more likely to be hospitalized for mental illness than those who don’t and more than four times as likely to attempt suicide. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, suicide is now the second leading cause of death among children 10-14 and the third leading cause of death among those 15-24.

Self-harm is a social contagion — one of many — that is fed by social media. ...



.... If you insult some guy who pretends to be black, nobody cares. If you insult some guy who pretends to be a dragon, nobody cares. If you insult some guy who wants to have sex with animals, nobody cares. If you insult guys who get off on pretending to be women, everyone loses their mind.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

"Watch your thoughts, they become words;
Watch your words, they become actions;
Watch your actions, they become habits;
Watch your habits, they become character;
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny." 
Frank Outlaw

This is the Story About How Machine Learning Drives the Education System to Destroy Science

........

Childhood education is a total mess. We send children to over-engineered prisons, designed by politicians and vocational interest groups, then act as if we have no solutions to the madness.

.......

Ron Unz blames the situation on the winner-take-all Western economy that masquerades as the American Meritocracy. This is certainly true for some people, but I'll draw from the intelligence community's description of the motivations of double agents: M.I.C.E.
  • Money
  • Ideology
  • Compromised
  • Ego
Pick your rat poison, so to speak.

.....

From Catastrophe to Worse

The situation was bad enough when artificial intelligence arrived on the scene. ......



Satirical Fare:






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