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Tuesday, October 25, 2022

2022-10-25

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


Economic and Market Fare:



....... As I've been noting for well over a year, Chart #1 (growth of the M2 money supply) is the most important financial news that nobody (outside of a handful of economists) has been paying any attention to. As the chart shows, there was explosive growth (completely unprecedented!) in the money supply in 2020, driven almost entirely by the monetization of Covid stimulus payments in 2020-2021. This was the proximate cause of the inflation which has wracked the country for almost two years. Fortunately, with the cessation of Covid payments in mid-2021, M2 growth cooled dramatically: M2 has not increased meaningfully for the past 9 moths, and it has in fact declined at a 2.2% annualized rate over the past 6 months, as we learned from this morning's release of the September numbers. This all but guarantees a future decline in measured inflation. 

If the Fed had been paying attention to the slowdown in M2, they would have toned down their tightening 4-5 months ago. And of course, if they had been paying attention to M2 18 months ago, they would have begun raising rates long before it became painfully obvious that we had an inflation problem. 



There were two headlines on Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC’s news site this morning that tell us that there has been little progress made in helping people better understand the way the monetary system operates and the capacities of the currency-issuing government within it. Both articles merely rehearsed the standard mainstream fictions, which makes them dangerous, in that they perpetuate the system that has held the world back from addressing its major challenges. By creating false ‘challenges’ and false ‘probabilities of crisis’, these stories delay action that is necessary to deal with the real problems of climate change, inequality, degradation of public infrastructure and services, the health crisis, etc

The other problem is that these ‘analysis’ columns pretend to be balanced, [which] is a ruse to bestow legitimacy or authority on themselves. ‘Experts’, who are wheeled out to ratify the fiction, are just part of the Groupthink. It is a circular system of nonsense. Very disappointing. ...



In September, the president of the Dutch central bank wrote what may have been the most remarkable letter of his career: it said that the ECB’s interest rate hikes will lead to losses for De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) for the first time since 1932. Several countries throughout the eurozone are facing a similar problem. To absorb the losses of their central banks, European taxpayers risk having to pay tens or even hundreds of billions of euros a year. Meanwhile private banks get that same amount of money without having to do anything in return. The ECB now stands ready to make a crucial policy decision to determine whether billions in taxpayer money will again flow to the banking sector.



........ All of which implies yet another quarter of contraction...

Just don't call it a recession.



....... 
Key Stats 
  • The queue of ships waiting to unload at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach fell from a peak of 109 ships in January to four vessels this week.
  • Descartes Datamyne, a data analysis group owned by supply-chain software company Descartes Systems Group Inc., says container imports to the U.S. in September declined by 11% from a year earlier and by 12.4% from August.
  • Shipping lines have canceled between 26% to 31% of their sailings across the Pacific over the coming weeks, according to Sea-Intelligence
  • In September of 2021 the average cost for shipping a container from Asia to the U.S. West Coast exceeded $20,000. Last week, the average cost to ship a container from Asia to the U.S. West Coast had declined 84% from a year earlier to $2,720.




Soaring AmEx Bad Loan Provisions Confirm Rot Spreading To Upper-Income Consumers




Quotes of the Week:




Bubble Fare:


.... The Hang Seng Tech Index dropped as much as 9%. The index is down more than 74% since peaking in 1Q21.





Other Fare:






Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


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


Regular Fare:



Let’s call it Weaponized Governmental Failure. It’s the single most explicative factor in the breakdown of American political consensus in the 21st century, even though it’s been around since the latter part of the 20th century. The simple definition of Weaponized Governmental Failure is this: it’s the deliberate refusal to perform the basic tasks of urban governance for a specific political purpose. The crime and the graft and the potholes and the bad drainage, not to mention the spotty trash collection or nonexistent snow shoveling, aren’t incompetence. In fact, none of what you see in the American public sector is incompetence. The people responsible for it are quite highly educated and well-trained in their craft. You just need to understand what their craft is. It’s a choice to do a poor job with the more mundane tasks of running a city, and an educated and purposeful choice at that. ......

The urban socialist Left wants a manageably small core of rich residents and a teeming mass of poor ones, and nothing in between. That’s what Weaponized Governmental Failure produces, and it’s a wide-scale success.  ....



.... I should have expected that. You can't fight beliefs with data, and that's especially true when the data challenge an entrenched worldview. To understand that, just try to discuss the limits to economic growth with an economist. Or maybe try to teach stratigraphy to a biblical literalist -- I never did that, but I suppose the results would be the same.

........ True, the Western governments didn't arrive at the point of exterminating people's pets, but the Covid pandemic showed how similar Westerners and Chinese are: both easily coerced into submission by authoritarian governments. The main difference seems to be that the Chinese still trust their government, and we bloody don't. 



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



Was it Bismark that purportedly said that people don’t want to see how these two things are made: the sausage, and politics? He forgot the third one, namely $cience.

Here’s an excellent video demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that they hold us for fools when counting those 0-14 days post jab as unvaccinated.

Prof. Norman Fenton explains in a Twitter post: “If a person vaxxed against a virus is classified as 'unvaxxed' within the first 2 weeks, then even a placebo vaxx can be shown to be 'effective' in observational trials. This simple 4-minute animation with a hypothetical example explains why”: ....

They can pull any efficacy they want out of the $cience hat with a few simple tricks, if we don’t watch their hands. I.e., they have been openly mocking all of humanity for the last 3 years, with impunity.

Fact-check this, will ya? I only fear that this video will be pulled from YouTube for violating the terms, and the author banned from Twitter for promoting vaccine hesitancy.

P.S. I was alerted to the fact that Joel Smalley has just reproduced Prof. Fenton’s logic in his own video remake yesterday. The more the merrier, to hammer the message home: ...



CO-VIDs of the Week:

********** re-upping; PLEASE PLEASE WATCH THIS:
********** The Real Anthony Fauci: The Movie
Part 1 is Viewable for 10 days for free

Two Soviet expats talk about medical fraud and living under the mob.

..... Compelled to understand what was going on, Alexandra rolled up her sleeves and got to work. She looked at VAERS and discovered huge discrepancies between the lots, where some batches had just a few reported severe adverse events, and some had over 1500...

In the interview, Alexandra mentions the uneven distribution of “lot mortality” in the U.S. where the coasts did relatively fine, while some Midwestern states did very poorly, with very high numbers of reported deaths per a hundred thousand doses. The worst state is South Dakota (30+ reported deaths per 100,000 shipped doses). The areas that did even worse, according to Sasha, were some of the U.S. territories with high percentage of indigenous population

... Another point that Alexandra highlights is the total, compete, and Soviet-like lack of any adherence to any expected standards of, well, anything, during all phases of development and production of this product. Not only did they skip important phases of clinical trials (which is known, and explained away by “warp speed,” etc.)—but there have also been blatant fabrications and distortions of facts ...

Sasha’s findings offer a possible explanation for why, based on manufacturing fraud alone, some people would get particularly lucky and some people particularly unlucky with adverse events. Some vials are “empty” and filled with garbage “placebo,” and some are “super loaded” with God knows what.

And by “God knows what” I mean that, according to Sasha who has been working with a number of teams analyzing the vials, in cases where they did find segments of mRNA in the vials and sequenced them, the resulting sequences had very little to do with what they were supposed to be, according to the official specifications. Using Sasha’s words, it was “garbage soup.” 

Remarkably, some analyzed vials were reported to contain left over magnetic beads (magnetic beads are used in production of mRNA). Remember the “crazy” videos of some people developing magnetism in the place of injection? .........

To quote Alexandra’s TrialSiteNews article,
Many of us are familiar with the following conundrum: on one hand, highly credentialed scientists and doctors have written numerous research papers explaining the dangerous mechanisms of action underlying mRNA/DNA “platform” technologies.  The papers are meticulously researched and depict, correctly in my opinion, many terrifying consequences of the technology that breaches the innate protective mechanisms of human cells.  Furthermore, these theoretical papers are validated by the observed outcomes, such as for example, increases in all-cause mortality in high correlation. with increases in rates of vaccination in a given territory, unprecedented increases in the adverse events and deaths recorded by various passive reporting systems, astonishingly high reports of the adverse events and deaths from the pharmas’ own pharmacovigilance systems, and autopsy findings in vaccinated post-mortem showing the mechanisms of mRNA technology damage in histopathologic evaluations.  On the other hand, many who have received the injections report no adverse effects and deem the points above a “crazy conspiracy”.  The question from the uninjured seems to be – why don’t we see MORE deaths if what you say about mRNA products is true?  Setting aside ethical limitations of this question, here is a possible answer why: 

The mRNA shots do not conform to their label specifications. In practice both “blank” and "lethal" vials and anything in between is produced
.....




Pushback Fare:




COVID Conspiracy Fare:


I’m a little depressed right now and you will be too, after you’ve finished reading this. Basically, to summarize it, I can use five words: They left the stitches in. That is, you can just look at the genome of SARS-COV-2 and it becomes obvious that this is a lab-born monstrosity that was being used in some experiments. I’ve written about this before, how you can see the genetic fingerprints in SARS-COV-2’s passage through mice, but if you look at this evidence, it becomes abundantly clear. Let it marinade for a bit, the realization will dawn on you that this is really happening.

And what you have to keep in mind is that these virologists who are telling you on Twitter that these are all outrageous conspiracy theories by people with a kindergarten level understanding of biology also know this. They’re not stupid, they’re just lying to you. They have a better understanding of this material than most of us, they would have figured this sort of stuff out within moments of observing the genome. In fact, as soon as they saw the Furin cleavage site, they knew what was going on. ..............





Drs. Valentin Bruttel, Tony VanDongen and I wrote a preprint finding evidence of a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2. The online discussion of our paper ranged from uncritical support to critical consideration to every manner of insult and accusation, including ableism, scientists claiming I don’t have a PhD, and more. This letter aims to clarify who I am, what colleagues and I have done in the preprint, and what my intentions are. ........



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


First, a diatribe against the word “narrative,” now pervasively used in commentary, particularly what purports to be political/geopolitical reporting. What is a narrative? It is a story. Until recently, “narrative” referred to plot lines in works of fiction, such as screenplays. So the widespread use of the word “narrative” to describe various official and press efforts to ‘splain what is happening in Ukraine is an up-front warning that what you are being told could very well be the product of overheated imaginations.

Lambert is sometime wont to say: “You can’t reverse engineer the truth out of bullshit.” But then he adds, “But God knows we try.” So here we go again. .....

Alexander Mercouris, who did stay measured, pointed out at the top of his Sunday show that he’s never seen such a stark divergence between Western and Russia-friendly commentary, and then unpacked which version had better factual foundations, focusing on the battlefield.

As we will see below, the Russian leadership, even in this front-line to-ing and fro-ing stage, sees Ukraine as readying to escalate, and in particularly nasty ways. So this may be the phase when energy is building up in a system before it goes chaotic.

To try to step back from the fog of narrative:

Russia’s campaign against the Ukraine electrical grid and selected military targets looks to be very effective and very much underreported. The fact that the Western press is acknowledging only in passing that Russia has seriously damaged up to 40% of Ukraine’s electrical grid (this from a Ukraine official at the end of last week) is a tacit admission that the US and NATO don’t want to talk about it. It’s a big problem for which they have no answer. ...........

That alone argues for Russia making maximum use of this approach in the face of the US/NATO inability to respond. Why should Russia use more men and materiel than it needs to, and subject Ukraine cities to more shelling (and impose more rebuilding costs on Russia), if it can prostrate Ukraine by turning off nearly all its power? .......

As I indicate in an earlier post, the more the prospect of battlefield success recedes for Ukraine, the more Ukraine will fall back to terrorist acts. The dirty bomb idea, whether just (potentially idle) chatter or a more advanced scheme, is just an example of what Ukraine could try to execute.

If I were Russia, that argues for hobbling Ukraine as quickly as possible. And the fastest way to achieve that is doing enough damage to the electrical grid to severely limit movement and communication across Ukraine. That won’t stop attacks, but it ought to markedly reduce their number.




Other Geopolitical Fare:

By confiscating frozen Russian funds and giving them to Ukraine, the West could be shooting itself in the foot



We live in one of the most important moments in history. Perhaps this moment is even more important than the end of the Cold War. Similar to those events more than 30 years ago, major geopolitical shifts are currently taking place today. If the end of the cold war saw the rise of the Western Bloc to dominance, then the start of this new Cold War has seen the return of a new Eastern Bloc, ready to assert its rightful place in the world.

The era of Western interventions, regime change operations and hit and run tactics is almost at an end. Today, countries such as China, Russia and Iran are challenging the US militarily, economically and politically. Many of the former international equations that were true only a few years ago are changing with great speed, especially after the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.

If we consider the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry as the first part of changing the structures of the world, then the key part that would change the entire structure is the moment when Russia decided to say enough to Washington and put their foot down, once and for all.

This has inspired defiance among the oppressed nations of the world. The conflict in Ukraine has proven that most of the countries in the world, which even the United States counted on as allies, are against the policies of the United States and in practice are not willing to go along with the policies of the United States. .....

... Such a move would likely lead the Saudis to turn towards Tehran and, in extension the emerging Eastern alliance. This would lead to a major geopolitical shift in the region that would endanger Israel, and thus also raise the risk of a large conflict in the region. ...

Washington is in decline, while the Eastern Bloc is on the rise. Even the staunchest of Empire supporters cannot deny this fact. Since Washington and the collective West are in decline, they are also growing more aggressive. This has been witnessed by us all in Ukraine where the collective West have brought mankind to the brink of nuclear war. This can be seen in the aggressive policies regarding Taiwan, violating previous agreements and commitments to respecting China’s sovereignty. This was as clear as day during the recent foreign-backed riots in Iran. In sum, the US basically tried to extort Tehran into accepting a “temporary” JCPOA deal on Washington’s terms and conditions. Seeing as how Tehran would not yield on its demands for guarantees that Washington wouldn’t renege on the deal once more, they created these riots to force and pressure Tehran to accept Washington’s terms.

A desperate attempt to create a color revolution, with the help of hundreds of thousands of Twitter bots, especially since the riots quickly lost momentum thanks to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) vigilance and experience in dealing with foreign-backed plots to overthrow the Islamic Republic. The timing of the riots made it clear for Tehran that it was a desperate move to secure natural gas for the winter, especially since they destroyed Europe’s gas deliveries through NS1 and NS2 .....



It’s hard to escape the awful feeling that Western Civ has a death wish, or say which of its constituent nations wants to get to the graveyard first. Great Britain might be leading the pack with its Three-Card-Monte financial finagling economy and hot potato political leadership. Old Blighty sinks visibly by the day into sclerotic torpor — even while its MI-6 intel gang works overtime scheming to blow things up, to make the Russia-Ukraine mess worse. Newly-tapped Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces the same set of quandaries that sank Boris Johnson and Liz Truss...

... Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the other lesser NATO players just bystand stupidly as the alliance declares war on reality and all of Europe slides toward neo-medieval cold and darkness.

Then there’s us, Crazyland, formerly known as the USA, floating the possibility of a nuclear missile exchange, as if that were any kind of workable answer to the completely unnecessary war we instigated in the crossroads of Eurasia. ....



.... to suggest that Mr. Sunak, if he wins, will have been elected by ….the City of London.  This is not merely because he worked for Goldman Sachs before entering the House of Commons six years ago. It is because the City of London, aka Capital or The Markets effectively removed Liz Truss from office by facilitating the dramatic crash of gilts and the slide of the pound. The markets were responding to one stimulus: the evident incompetence, particularly the ignorance of economic laws demonstrated by the PM and her Chancellor of the Exchequer when they rolled out their mini-Budget shortly after taking office. The City was not interested in ideological convictions of the PM; they were interested in what works and what does not work in the real world.

Now what is extraordinary about that, you may ask? It is extraordinary that in the UK Capital still speaks, still decides who runs the country and how.  That raw fact alone may be the best justification for Brexit, because it sets Britain apart from every country on the Continent. Here in Europe we see incompetence in the premiers, in the cabinets of country after country. For the most part, it is not because the individuals in power are stupid, but because they have assumed portfolios for which they have had no grounding in their education or in their professional careers.  They receive their portfolios or leadership batons strictly through political horse-trading among coalition partners who have different agendas and agree only on the desirability of sharing out the spoils of electoral victory within the proportional representation schemes in place. And the same applies to the European Commission which sits atop all of the member states and barks orders. What is the quality of economic or defense decisions that you can expect to come from the desk of one Ursula von der Leyen, whose professional education was as a gynecologist and who was kicked upstairs to Brussels after she failed, as minister, to keep the German Defense Ministry free of corruption scandals.

Here across Europe, and particularly in what is considered to be the locomotive of the European Union’s economy, Germany, Capital is silent.  Silent in the face of economic incompetence in high places no less egregious than that displayed by Liz Truss.  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is destroying the German economy by his stubborn, asinine insistence on denying Russian hydrocarbons access to the German and EU markets ....


Gearóid Ó Colmáin: Iran’s Defence of Women

For several weeks now the world’s media have been focused on Iran where the sudden death of Mahsa Amini, a twenty two year old woman, is being blamed on the country’s morality police. The woman’s death has sparked protests in several cities in the country.

Although the Iranian government denies any wrong doing, and has shown CCTV footage of the woman suddenly collapsing, Western media and their government cohorts have made no effort to find out what really happened because reality is of no concern to them. And the story of an innocent girl being brutally murdered by a theocratic and patriarchal tyranny is far too useful to them.

The most important fact about Mahsa Amini is that she came from a country which holds the world’s second highest gas reserves. Thus a previously unknown and perhaps insignificant figure has posthumously been transformed into a geopolitical tool of the West in its attempt to destroy revolutionary Shiism and install Western liberal democracy in its stead.

Whether Republican or Democrat, US foreign policy towards Iran never changes. With Trump we had unrelenting bellicosity and demonisation, with Biden the US is reverting to the tried-and-tested policy of regime change through soft power and culture war.



..... Each time that outside forces have meddled in the name of helping Haiti, they have reliably made things worse. The current crisis is itself the product of ongoing interference on the part of the U.S. government, which backed former President Jovenel Moïse when he was alive and has been instrumental in keeping Henry in power despite his lack of democratic legitimacy and the broad coalition of Haitians opposed to his continued rule. That is a continuation of a destructive pattern of U.S. backing for abusive Haitian leaders that goes back to the Cold War and an even longer tradition of U.S. domination that goes back centuries. ....





Orwellian Fare:

A Popular Rationalism Exclusive by Dr. Mark McDonald

..... Fact-checkers have now been installed at every level of public and private communication, interfering with and eliminating “misinformation” that threatens the reigning political orthodoxy. Technology, which has largely been a force for good since the Industrial Revolution, has been transformed into a weapon to track the speech, actions, purchases, and movements of individual Americans. Geolocators, biometric identification, and internet eavesdropping (on web browsing, email, and text messages) have led to a degree of information archiving never before possible, destroying any possibility of individual privacy. Soon, technology will be used regularly for forced resource reallocation, as our home thermostat settings will be remotely determined by government-run power companies, and our electric car batteries will be selectively blocked from charging based on our current “green” social credit scores. The former has already happened, in 2021, in the state of Texas. As our currency transforms into a purely digital form centrally controlled by the feds, what we buy and whether we can access our money will be in the hands of government officials in Washington. Better not disobey their orders, or you will be banned from purchasing food. All of it has already been implemented in foreign countries like Canada, Australia, and China.

We are now moving from an authoritarian nation to a totalitarian one. Authoritarians tell you what you cannot do. Totalitarians tell you what you must do. You must wear a mask. You must stay home. You must get tested. You must inject yourself (and your children) with an untested and dangerous drug. You must flee your home when criminals break into it. You must expose your children to pedophiles. You must castrate your children if they feel confused about their gender. You must offer your income, your property, and your body to the government or face exile from society, if not indefinite confinement in a cell. ......





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


Why bother changing these Tory leaders? They differ only in hairstyles.



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

Defend Your Children



..... At the end of the movie the gang finds themselves engaging in the practice on purpose to try and close the door to another dimension and save New York City. In other words, they incited “protonic reversal” to try and make the “inside out” ghost world become “outside in” again. The world became the inverse of what it once was.

To me, it seems pretty obvious that the woke world has crossed the streams: it is currently in the midst of the same type of inversion and, while the public is starting to notice it clearly, those perpetuating the wokeness are unaware of the destruction they are creating to their own universe.

Woke ideology, which took the virtuous and noble ideas of caring for those around you and equality of opportunity and then, as postmodernism does, permutated them an infinite number of times over until they were completely incomprehensible and meaningless, has hit an inflection point. ...

.... As these stunning revelations were taking place, which put the vast touted lie of sterilizing immunization into clear, simple words and terms that the everyday citizen could easily understand, Academy Award and Grammy Award nominated musician M.I.A. asked:
“If Alex Jones pays for lying, shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?”
... For all of the unadulterated praise the woke has for females, artists and immigrants, one would think M.I.A. - an artist of Sri Lankan decent who was forced to become a refugee at age 11, and who went on to be one of the first “viral” artists to leverage the internet to distribute her work - would rest comfortably at a cross section of bold female leaders praised for challenging the status quo and adored by the woke.

... It seems clear to me that when the mob starts cancelling the very same woke artists they once worshipped for being original and asking critical questions, the idea of using art and music to push for change is in the midst of dying a slow, ironic death. ...


Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

How to learn the world, intimately

..... The devastating irony of the age we live in is that so much of our time is spent meaninglessly nowadays, whether it is generating profits for companies or being stuck in traffic jams; the complexity of our day and age undermines meaning. One would perhaps think increased complexity would increase meaning but this harks back to John Gowdy’s work that increasingly complex societies demand increasingly simple individuals. The mechanisms of our self-deception facilitate our self-destruction.

Our unwillingness, or inability, to change course seemingly goes against evolution, whatever force has been driving life since the big bang. It is quite extraordinary. And the extraordinary nature of this situation that we find ourselves leads it also to be a potentiality of huge transformation. The metacrisis—the global economic, energy, political, ecological crises—is so complicated that the solution simply cannot lie with one person. There isn’t a brain on the planet which can synthesise all of the requisite information and provide a solution. We are going to have to think collectively to get through this, which may also be why we don't get through it.

But thinking and imagining collectively on a previously unimaginable scale could render humankind infinite, in a sense; it could force a shift in evolution, at least social evolution. In that, there is much to be excited about amongst the collapsology. ....



Satirical Fare:



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