Pages

Thursday, November 3, 2022

2022-11-03

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


Economic and Market Fare:

"It Makes Sense To Slow Down" - Wall Street Reacts To The Fed's Unexpected "Soft Pivot"

.....

Eric Winograd, AllianceBernstein:
“The statement is clear that they would like to slow the pace of hikes. In addition to looking at the data and looking at markets, they are also now considering the cumulative impact of what they have already done. And the lag with with that will hit the economy. Most estimates are that it takes 9-12 months for rate hikes to be felt, and 12-18 months for the maximum effect. We are only just now eight months past the first rate hike, so it makes sense to slow down. I would think rates down, curve steeper, stocks up, based on the statement."

Peter Boockvar, CIO at Bleakley Advisory Group:
“The front loading is essentially over and rate hikes from here will be more cognizant of the new economic environment we’re in with respect to the much higher cost of capital and economic clouds that are circling. This is the Fed’s way of telling us that a slowdown in the pace of future hikes is upon us.”

.....


The statement added language highlighting that the Fed would take into consideration the cumulative amount of hikes and the lag effect of hikes. That was viewed positively by myself and markets. It was the first nod to the “lag effect” we’ve seen, which was taken to mean the Fed is dialing back on their hikes.

The press conference was used to disabuse the market of that notion. The press conference was taken as hawkish for a few reasons:
  • Potentially higher terminal rate (this was new).
  • Higher rates for longer (not sure this was new).
  • Willingness to overshoot because they can cut if needed (this was new).
  • Little progress on inflation (from the group that transitory all of last year).
  • Mention of CPI (which is highly likely to overstate rent for the coming months because of how it was calculated and concerns those of us who don’t like reliance on data that seems out of sync with what is occurring in real time).
Powell killed the rally, took stocks and bonds down hard and we are seeing that continue overnight and into the morning session. 

What Now?
The “buy everything” rally has pulled back, with the S&P 500 back to 3,745 (where it was on 10/21. The 10-year yield is back to 4.2%, just below the 4.22% on 10/21.

We will get more Fed speakers. They will “clarify” the message.

The “hope” for bulls (and I am still in that camp, though having to re-think it after yesterday’s reversal which highlighted positioning that wasn’t extremely bearish) is data dependence.

Bulls need to see progress on the inflation front in the official data.

Getting weaker than expected inflation data is my base case. While the Fed doesn’t see it, many economists and companies see it.

Whether that can show up in the data the Fed watches most closely is the question as OER for example, incorporates old data and is catching up to the rent inflation it missed from almost a year ago. ...




Preoccupied with enhancing their own ‘credibility’ and reputations, central banks are again driving the world economy into recession, financial turmoil and debt crises.



........ I am glad that I am not alone in thinking there is a narrative conspiracy going on around inflation, because there undoubtedly is.


Platform Most-Favored Nations clauses turn private unilateral market power into economy-wide inflation.

It’s fair to say that no one has any good explanations for why post-pandemic inflation has been so hard to tame. But plenty of people think they know what isn’t the cause: concentration and market power on a macroeconomic scale that enables dominant firms to raise prices without fear their customers will leave for the competition (since there isn’t any). ..
My claim is that platform MFNs are a hidden cause of the current macroeconomic inflation. An economy full of dominant intermediaries, all of whom use MFNs and their non-price equivalents, is an economy primed to turn private unilateral market power into widespread macroeconomic inflation when it comes time for recoupment.
...
You can thank the conservative Supreme Court majority for the current inflation.
...
The real “Inflation Reduction Act” should have been a wholesale overturning of the lax jurisprudence of vertical restraints that the federal judiciary has imposed since 1977.
Beyond bad caselaw, however, the other culprit is the absence of any will on the part of Congress to change it. As far as I know, no federal legislation has been proposed to overturn Ohio v. American Express and the whole panoply of lax antitrust jurisprudence of vertical restraints imposed by dominant market actors—despite the fact the 2020 House Majority Report of the Antitrust Subcommittee explicitly called for such legislation. Even as Congress has spent the last year or more decrying high inflation, and the Fed has been tasked with preventing it with the only tool it has, a severe economic slowdown, none of the legal levers available to enhance platform competition and threaten the profits of the economy’s most powerful gatekeepers and middlemen has been pulled.



EvG explains, “Credit has increased dramatically through derivatives.  All instruments being issued now by banks, pension funds, stock funds, it’s all synthetic.  There is no real underlying payments in anything almost..."

" Therefore, my estimate for derivatives would be at least $2 quadrillion, and I think that is probably conservative.  Then, we have debt on top of that of $300 trillion, and we also have a couple hundred trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities.  So, we are talking about $2.5 quadrillion, and that’s with a global GDP of $80 trillion.  So, there is a disaster waiting to happen, and especially because all this created money has created no value whatsoever...

I always knew this would collapse, and it’s taken longer than I expected, but I think we are at the end of a major era...

These derivatives, at some point in the coming few years, will actually turn into debt.  Central banks will have to cover all the outstanding liabilities of the commercial banks as we are seeing now with Credit Suisse, Bank of England and etc.  This is going to happen across the board.  Whether it’s called derivatives or called debt, as far as I am concerned, it’s the same thing.  It will have the same effect on the world financial system, which will be disastrous, of course.”

... “Nobody can repay the debt, and they can’t even pay interest...So, therefore, when the debt implodes, so will the assets that were financed by this debt. 

So, both sides of the balance sheet have to come down.  Whether it comes down by 50%, 75% or 90%, I don’t know.....



Let the economists debate all day long about whether a recession is coming: In corporate earnings, one has already arrived, if you set aside the oil and gas industry. And the worst may not be over.





... The cooldown in rent growth is being mirrored by continued easing on the supply side of the market. Our vacancy index now stands at 5.5 percent, after a full year of gradual increases from a low of 4.1 percent last fall. In the past two months, this easing of the vacancy rate has picked up steam again, after plateauing a bit over the summer. That said, today’s vacancy rate remains below the pre-pandemic norm.


Job Openings Unexpectedly Soar In 2nd Best Month Of 2022, Despite Plunge In Hiring, Quits






...Under the hood of the Services PMI print, new export orders collapsed and employment contracted





....... Perhaps, JP Morgan's consolidated manufacturing PMIs suggest mounting recession risks and declining price pressure are a big theme in 2023. 



Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan’s vision of a collapsing supply chain will benefit US — if it can first tackle inflation

..... “Every disinflationary trend of the last 75 years has flipped, and every inflationary trend is back at the same time. We are looking at 9% to 15% inflation for at least the next five years — and that’s independent of anything the Fed does,” he said.



Vid of the Week:





Quotes of the Week:

Powell: “It's premature to discuss pausing.  It's not something that we're thinking about.  That's really not a conversation to be had now.  We have a way to go.”

moron



Charts: 
1:






Bubble Fare:


This quarter's earnings season has been vindicating the "value vs growth" hypothesis. The "growth" companies that have long been considered bulletproof and which were valued very expensively are reporting falling earnings, while value companies that are valued less expensively are turning out to have pricing power and are reporting higher earnings.

..... Investors in growth stocks were double counting - the companies were over-earning and these earnings were being capitalized at high multiples. Now that they are past peak cycle, the earnings are falling and they are being re-rated, and the shares are plunging. The NASDAQ is down 31% year-to-date. (Interestingly, the equal weight S&P 500 is down 14% YTD and SPY is down 19%.) So those are the big three "growth" examples. We have to put that in quotes now because their earnings are declining. They still have a combined $2.6 trillion market capitalization (down from $5 trillion at the peak!) and collectively they do not generate much cash (thanks to Amazon's cash burn and Facebook's "Metaverse" bet). Someday, the ex-growth companies expenses will be slashed, their earnings will bottom, and by then they will undoubtedly trade at cheap multiples. But that may take a long time since Facebook and Google are dual share class corporate governance disasters.



....... One can make the case that stocks are MORE overvalued now than they were at the top a year ago. Why? Because of the dual effect of reduced earnings and higher interest rates. Wall Street has been very slow to bring down earnings forecasts, and companies have been even slower to guide down for 2023. So now next year sits there like a big black hole of earnings visibility.

Perfect for those who don't want to believe that recession is inevitable. ......


I can't believe I'm quoting Schiff again, but here goes:

Artificially low interest rates blew up a big housing bubble. In a podcast, Peter Schiff explained that it is actually a bigger bubble than the one preceding the 2008 crash. But this time, it is combined with an overall bubble in the entire economy that dwarfs ’08. Peter said all of this has the makings of another massive financial crisis.


Recent price action says yes.... political and positioning analysis says no.



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


Other Fare:

"Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions …

Year after year economic theorists continue to produce scores of mathematical models and to explore in great detail their formal properties; and the econometricians fit algebraic functions of all possible shapes to essentially the same sets of data without being able to advance, in any perceptible way, a systematic understanding of the structure and the operations of a real economic system."


Pics of the Week:




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


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


Regular [Everyday Life] Fare:

Munk Debates: Mainstream Media
Be it resolved, don't trust mainstream media.
NOVEMBER 30, 2022

Public trust in mainstream media is at an all-time low. Critics point to coverage of COVID-19, the 2020 election, and the Ottawa trucker protest as proof that legacy outlets like the New York Times, The Globe and Mail and CNN can no longer be relied upon to provide unbiased reporting. Activist journalists are using pen and paper to push political agendas while their bosses lean into the profitability of polarization. Mainstream media’s defenders argue that their institutions offer an invaluable public service that alternative outlets are either incapable or uninterested in providing: careful fact-based reporting on important issues and holding the powerful to account. In a brave new world of “fake news” and “drive by” journalism, traditional news organizations are essential to democracy and a bulwark against corruption, misinformation and the private interests of the powerful.
The Debaters 
PRO
Douglas Murray
Matt Taibbi

CON
Malcolm Gladwell
Michelle Goldberg



Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

This is almost too naked, too on-the-nose. But is he wrong?



This is Part 5 of an on-going series I am writing about the issues facing societies dealing with climate change and other elements which come together as a poly crisis. The series will unfold as I research and think about the topic more through my Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) lens. Today, I am concluding the analysis of the questions relating to the ageing society and the resulting skill shortages, that the mainstream narrative identifies as key ‘problems’ facing governments across the Western world. Like any issue, the way the ‘problem’ is constructed or framed influences the conclusions we come up with. Further, the tools use to operationalise that construction also influence the scope and quality of the analysis and the resulting conclusions. As I explained in Monday’s blog post – Degrowth, deep adaptation, and skills shortages – Part 4 (October 31, 2022) – the use of mainstream macroeconomics fails to deliver appropriate policy advice on these questions. But further, when we introduce multi-dimensional complexity – such as degrowth to the ageing society issue – the mainstream approach becomes catastrophic. MMT is a much better analytical framework for drilling down to see what the essential problem is and what are non-problems and thus creating the questions and answers that lead to sound policy. Today, I show why the existence of skills shortages really provides us with the space to pursue a degrowth strategy while not causing material standards of living to collapse. They are better seen as indicator of what is possible rather than a macro problem.






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




I’m going to have to break my self-imposed rule of posting once a day today. One thing I have said a looooooot of times, is that you needed to avoid this booster shot, because it is the stupidest thing you could do. See for example, November 14 2021:
If you do decide to boost, you merely kick the can down the hall until next winter. Everytime you inject someone with the same old version of the Spike protein, the immune system learns to zoom in more on this version of the Spike protein, to the expense of its ability to adjust to any novel variants that emerge. It appears to work well in the short term, as evidenced by Israel, but it’s not a sustainable solution, because you hamper the immune system in its ability to adjust to the inevitable further evolution of this virus.
You can look at my posts from late 2021, I was constantly warning about this, to anyone who might listen. I have also argued that the vaccines, through original antigenic sin, have caused the big growing waves of SARS-COV-2 reinfections in Western nations, not seen in those with low vaccination rates. And so you’ll have to forgive me, when I bring it up that the evidence available now proves me correct: ......

I’m trying very hard, to come up with a post where I explain what the vaccinated can do to repair their immune response to this virus. The reason such a post doesn’t exist yet on this blog, is because I haven’t seen a substantial solution yet. ..



.... But since this thread was posted, we now have the first example, of a rapidly spreading novel variant of SARS-COV-2, that came into existence due to molnupiravir. We know it was caused by molnupiravir, because its mutation profile fits exactly the sort of mutations molnupiravir induces, mutations that are rarely induced through natural evolution. This is a product of human tinkering with the genome, by administering medication to immunocompromised hosts that was specifically designed to induce mutations in SARS-COV-2.

What has happened here is worse than a second lab leak of one of these spliced together versions of SARS-COV-2 would be. SARS-COV-2 will naturally give rise to hybrid strains, this is inevitable. What’s not inevitable however, is a saltation of non-Spike genes. That doesn’t normally happen, because there’s no strong selection operating on those genes where every individual mutation would deliver a fitness benefit.

Although there may be versions that would work much better, you miss a viable path through the intermediate steps, as those don’t carry a fitness benefit. But with Molnupiravir, this doesn’t matter: You give this medication, the virus ends up with a large bunch of mutations in ORF1a or some other non-spike gene and it can stumble upon a different viable position in the fitness landscape for those genes by accident. .........

......... I will without a doubt be accused of fear-mongering by the usual suspects, who wish to sleep comfortably at night by blinding themselves to tail-risks. But the simple fact is as following: You haven’t got the slightest idea how you’re going to quantify the risk associated with what has happened here. It’s the equivalent of laughing at me, because you snorted a line of cocaine and didn’t drop dead even though I warned you it could be contaminated with fentanyl.

But allow me to illustrate to you again, the insanity of what humans have allowed to happen here: ........

......... This is not the first Molnupiravir variant, it’s just the first one seen spreading from person to person. But you have to keep in mind, that Molnupiravir can do to other viruses what it does to SARS-COV-2. It could take any other respiratory virus and teleport it across the fitness landscape. It’s an insane unprecedented global experiment, it’s the first time we’re trying to fight a virus by constantly randomly mutating it. They need to ban this drug right now and hope that we lucked out.



A new article on the dangers of COVID-19 mRNA vaccination has been published concerning potential integration of spike mRNA. 


Just when you think CDC ran out of ways to creatively cheat, Del Bigtree and his allies determine they have left off Myocarditis, Blood Clots, Thombocytopenia...



.......................... The long and short of it is that a simple BoE calculation shows us that we’re going to have to do an awful lot of jiggery pokery in order to make the cumulative death data consistent with the notion of a highly effective vaccine.

Vaccine nirvana or vaccine nervosa?

I’ll let you Pfigure that one out for yourselves.






[More] Pushback Fare:


In general, it’s difficult to write about covid - not because there’s little to say - but that there’s so bloody much to say. Trying to write down everything The Experts™ got wrong, or the list of authoritarian and illiberal excesses of governments, would turn into something longer than The Lord of the Rings.

Government Ringwraiths unleashed their campaign of fear and the covid-orcs rampaged against the smaller forces of sanity, true science, and goodness. But the Gandalfs of the pandemic - the Istari like Eugyppius, ElGatoMalo, Malone and McCullough1 - stood firm and prevailed.

Not everything was obvious from the outset, but so much was. It’s fascinating that the small band of “science deniers” turned out to be right vastly more often than The Experts™.

I’m all for a bit of forgive and forget when someone has transgressed (are they merely pretending to gress?), but an apology is usually a good place to start when seeking forgiveness. 

The author of this piece in the Atlantic (which I haven’t read because Atlantic articles sit smugly behind a paywall) seems to imply a kind of symmetry here. We need to forgive one another.

Eh? What, pray tell, did those of us on the side of science and truth actually do wrong? We weren’t the ones calling for the unvaxxed to be denied basic human rights and freedoms, to be stripped of their livelihoods, and treated like sub-human disease carriers. We weren’t the ones filling skateboard parks with sand so that kids couldn’t play. Outside. Or fining people for sitting alone on a park bench. Outside. Or closing down small businesses. Or turning people away from important hospital treatments and investigations. Or letting our loved ones die alone. And so much more.

Amnesty? You can shove your amnesty where Pelosi’s intruder is alleged to have shoved his hammer. ....



....... When I read through this article, I realize the author highlighted a very common problem I observe in human interactions (which I will admit I have also been guilty of). The author is demanding to receive forgiveness for their conduct, but in their apology, is refusing to admit they did anything wrong. In order to accomplish this, they utilized a variety of manipulative rhetorical constructs that are relatively simple and frequently utilized. ....




Nothing is Forgotten, Nothing Will Be Forgiven.

On the very first day of this year I wrote that the pandemic was over and that only the most brainwashed true believers would cling to the absurd narratives that enabled it. Since then, all of it has been exposed to be falsehoods, cluelessness and lies:
  • Vaccines were never tested or proven to stop transmission.
  • The fatality rate was around 0.005%
  • Ivermectin worked
  • Masks don’t
  • Lockdowns did more damage than good
…and the final straws for the credibility of all involved:
  • This thing came out of a lab, and
  • "Safe and effective” turned into “sudden and unexpected”
Innumerable careers, reputations and lives have been destroyed in order to enforce a completely debunked narrative as truth. The mainstream media, Big Tech, governments at all levels, neo-liberal glee clubs like the WEF, all coordinated to gaslight the entire population of the world that we were facing existential annihilation, and would have to henceforth trade in our civil rights to these authorities to escape it.

The economic damage is only now beginning to be felt in runaway inflation with central banks powerless to contain it, at risk of destroying what’s left of the economy.

We don’t need to enumerate the litany of injustice, ridicule and persecution  anybody who tried to counter these absurd narratives had to endure. Lost friends, family, jobs, position, businesses, cancelations, deplatformings – all of it.

So it is unsurprising, now that the edifice is crumbling, that those who piled on to the persecutions, those who feathered their nest being “on the right side of history”, seeing that it’s all turning to dust in realtime, are starting – one and all – to back away from their role.

Now the name of the game is to distance oneself from the most intense and virulent outbreaks of mass formation psychosis in recorded history .....


There must be a reckoning for pandemic tyranny
....
Things We Should Never Forget
1: Lockdowns were Never Part of the Plan
The WHO and CDC had publicly available pandemic plans in place based on a century’s worth of experience.

Do you know what wasn’t in these plans? Widespread lockdowns and mask wearing.

Do you know what was in these plans but completely absent from the Covid response? Risk-benefit analyses and the consideration of ethical issues. ...

2: They Shut Down Access to Repurposed Drugs
The establishment not only shut down all debate about repurposed drugs (HCQ, Ivermectin), they also moved aggressively to even restrict access to such treatments under the supervision of your own doctor.

I believe that many lives could have been saved with early treatment. On the flipside, there’s no evidence that public health would have been negatively affected if it had turned out that these repurposed drugs were not effective. ...

3: They Lied about the Nature of the Virus
They refused to acknowledge anything that was widely known to be true about the “novel” virus:
  1. It behaves like other coronaviruses
  2. There are significant numbers of asymptomatic cases
  3. Pre-existing immunity exists (indicating T-Cell immunity)
  4. Vaccines for respiratory viruses don’t provide sterilizing immunity, thus don’t stop transmission
  5. Natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity and long lasting
..........


But someone had to say it out loud.


Our representatives swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. They didn’t keep it.
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”
– United States Federal Oath of Office
When unelected health officials called for the complete subjugation of citizens’ rights to their vain, absurdist attempts to control a respiratory virus, how many of our representatives stood up to support and defend the Constitution? .....

....... Contrary to popular perception, authoritarian regimes don’t typically begin with malignant villains plotting to enslave their subjects. Rather, authoritarian regimes most often begin with fanatical leaders who become obsessively devoted to the success of failed policies, rationalizing exception after exception to their opponents’ rights as being necessary to serve some higher goal, when the goal was never actually obtainable to begin with. As the regimes’ crimes multiply nearly as quickly as their failures, the leaders grow increasingly fearful of what their opponents might do, and they’re forced to devote more and more government resources to the suppression of dissent—until all that’s left is an endless war on their own people and an interminable campaign of propaganda to sustain the myth of the regime’s original ideals which are now belied by all of its actions.

Thus, for our elites to tie their careers to the prevention of scrutiny about the response to Covid-19 is a position inherently incompatible with democracy, because the entire response to Covid-19 has been a lie. ........



COVID Conspiracy Fare:

We have probable cause to suspect a laboratory origin

Suppose you are a detective and you uncovered a letter proposing to commit a murder using a silver bullet in a very specific room of a very specific building. You go to that room and find a body with a silver bullet inside. Beside the body there is a gun with fingerprints on the gun. It’s not a stretch to deduce that a murder occurred, and the primary suspect may be whoever wrote the letter. The gun doesn’t need to be smoking for one to have probable cause that a crime has been committed.

We have a similar body of evidence laying before us on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. ...


Why, from the very start, there's been very little doubt that this pandemic began in a lab


Academic publisher Springer allows the unspeakable truth to be printed


............. Following is the short version of this academic publication, the abstract.
Abstract: The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly accomplished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.
So how did we even get here? Step by normalizing step. With former President Barack Obama leading every step of the way. ....


Syed: Catch me if you can
NSW Health - infamous for manipulating COVID data - did it again. We caught them - again.

Here we go again. NSW Health, whose vaccine data is curated by the infamous $65m bionic vaccinologist1 Kristine Macartney’s group NCIRS (who obviously have no interest at all in making sure people swallow the government line even if it results in a huge death toll), have been caught with their hands in the COVID cookie jar. Again.

What do I mean by that? Well, they fixed the figures to make the COVID vaccines look better than they were - far better, in fact. Before I show you what they did this time, it’s worth reminding you what they did last time, which I posted here: ....



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


..... You got to ask, “What took them so long?”

The war in Ukraine clearly has entered a new phase, with Ukraine failing to press its offensive and Russia solidifying its lines of defense and launching counter attacks that are pushing Ukraine out of key strategic areas in Donetsk. It appears that the combination of the murder of Darya Dugina, the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines, the bombing of the Kerch bridge and the spoiled drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastapol convinced the Russians to step up its military strikes to destroy critical electrical and energy infrastructure that they had previously left intact.

Yet, even while achieving success in systematically turning off the lights and heat throughout Ukraine, Russia is focusing on destroying transformers and key transmission installations rather than blow up nuclear, thermal and water power plants. If those sites are still intact, Russia will face an easier reconstruction task once Ukraine is defeated. It is easier to install new transformers and power lines than it is to build a new nuclear reactor. Right?



The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.
― Frank Herbert, Dune

As we’ll outline below, most commentators may have missed a key implication of Russia’s surgical destruction of Ukraine’s electrical grid. Russia appears to be the only country that could put it back together in anything less than many years. That means if Ukraine is to be anything other than an underpopulated wasteland, Russia will be a key, arguably the central player in its reconstruction.

It’s still not clear, however, that even this source of leverage will induce the West to get over itself and eventually come to some kind of terms. ...



The Cuban Missile Crisis is a malicious misnomer. Cuba never had any nuclear missiles; it temporarily played host to some Soviet ones. The crisis started when Americans put their intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Turkey that posed a new threat the Soviet Union, which responded by placing similar missiles in Cuba, evening the score. The Americans flew into a rage but eventually calmed down and withdrew their missiles from Turkey. The Soviets withdrew their missiles from Cuba and the crisis was over. And so it should be called the American Missile Crisis.

What’s happening now couldn’t be more different. Unless you spent the last few weeks hiding under a rock, you have probably heard that some sort of new nuclear crisis is underway because of “Putin’s nuclear blackmail” or some such. Some people have suffered nervous exhaustion as a result, neglecting their duties and generally letting themselves go. Take former British PM Liz Truss, for instance. The poor silly thing latched on to Putin’s words that “the wind rose can point in any direction” (a factual point about the utter uselessness of tactical nuclear weapons). She then allowed the British economy to go into free-fall while she obsessively tracked the wind direction over the Ukraine. It all ended badly for poor Liz. Don’t be like Liz.

I am here to tell you that there is nothing going on beyond the usual—the usual Western propaganda fakery, that is.

In particular, this has nothing to do with anything Putin or with anything nuclear. Instead, this is all part of a desperate attempt to compensate for narrative failure, and a failed attempt at that. The problem for the collective West is simply this: 80% of the world’s population has refused to join it in condemning, sanctioning or otherwise punishing Russia, with some very large countries (China, India) either supportive or neutral on the subject.

Most of the world, including Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, is carefully watching Russia systematically destroy what was by far the largest and most capable NATO-equipped, NATO-commanded army in the world (the Ukrainian army, that is), understanding full well that what is unfolding is Washington’s Waterloo. ..........

.................... We can be sure that the Russians won’t launch a nuclear war because it’s risky and they don’t have to take that risk in order to win. We can be sure that the Americans won’t launch one because it would be suicide. And so we can all sit back and relax while the “Putin’s nuclear blackmail” narrative-mongers bark their stupid heads off. As for all those assorted media whores who are scaring people with their nuclear nonsense in order to catch some hype—shame on them!





Other Geopolitical Fare:


Germany has become an economic satellite of America’s New Cold War with Russia, China and the rest of Eurasia. Germany and other NATO countries have been told to impose trade and investment sanctions upon themselves that will outlast today’s proxy war in Ukraine. U.S. President Biden and his State Department spokesmen have explained that Ukraine is just the opening arena in a much broader dynamic that is splitting the world into two opposing sets of economic alliances. This global fracture promises to be a ten- or twenty-year struggle to determine whether the world economy will be a unipolar U.S.-centered dollarized economy, or a multipolar, multi-currency world centered on the Eurasian heartland with mixed public/private economies.

President Biden has characterized this split as being between democracies and autocracies. The terminology is typical Orwellian double-speak. By “democracies” he means the U.S. and allied Western financial oligarchies. Their aim is to shift economic planning out of the hands of elected governments to Wall Street and other financial centers under U.S. control. U.S. diplomats use the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to demand privatization of the world’s infrastructure and dependency on U.S. technology, oil and food exports.

By “autocracy,” Biden means countries resisting this financialization and privatization takeover. In practice, U.S. rhettoric means promoting its own economic growth and living standards, keeping finance and banking as public utilities. What basically is at issue is whether economies will be planned by banking centers to create financial wealth – by privatizing basic infrastructure, public utilities and social services such as health care into monopolies – or by raising living standards and prosperity by keeping banking and money creation, public health, education, transportation and communications in public hands.

The country suffering the most “collateral damage” in this global fracture is Germany. ....



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


Pointing out the various flaws in historical attempts at communism does not address the problem that if we don’t move from competition-based models to collaboration-based ones we’re going to destroy all life on this planet in short order. We’ve still got to find a way to change.

Have issues with Stalin and Mao? Okay. Cool. Our competition-based models are still destroying our biosphere and shoving us toward nuclear war. Our survival still depends on moving toward collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem toward the thriving of all beings. Babbling about Stalin and Mao doesn’t magically change the fact that we can’t keep doing this thing where human behavior is driven by profit and competition.

Leaving aside that many problems with communism have been wildly exaggerated and others are the direct result of sabotage and economic warfare by the capitalist empire, those criticisms never address the problem that capitalism has no solutions for our current existential crises. So we need systems which can address those existential crises. I see no models with any hope of sustainability that don’t involve a radical transition from competition to collaboration at every level. We will either accomplish that transition or we will go extinct. It really is that simple.

People tell me, “Capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve seen.”

It’s literally killing us. It’s brought us to the brink of extinction by environmental collapse or nuclear armageddon. That’s literally the worst failure that any system could possibly achieve. When your back is against the wall and your choices are between radical change and extinction, you’ve no other options but to try radical change. That’s the juncture we’re at right now.

The status quo political establishment has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. We could have a world of peace, equality, justice, health and harmony, but instead we’re marching toward dystopia and extinction. It is entirely within the reach of human potential to have a collaboration-based civilization where everyone works together toward human thriving. Our rulers have delivered only competition-based systems which do the exact opposite. They failed the test. Time for something new.

It doesn’t get any more fail than “Yeah we’ve competed ourselves into a situation where there might be a nuclear war that ends literally everything any minute now.” That’s the most fail you can have while still being alive enough to acknowledge the failure. The facts are in. They failed.

A system that fails to that extent does not deserve to exist, and should not exist. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and if we can just shake each other awake from the propaganda-induced coma we’re all in we can force the creation of much better systems.



Leaked documents reveal that the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population — the information systems people use to feed their minds and think their thoughts.

If it is the job of the US intelligence cartel to regulate society’s cognitive infrastructure, then it is the job of healthy human beings to disrupt the cognitive infrastructure.

Fill the cognitive infrastructure with information that is inconvenient for the powerful. 

Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure by saturating it with unauthorized speech.

Disrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Corrupt the cognitive infrastructure. Tell the cognitive infrastructure that the teacher is bullshitting and the preacher is a liar. Sneak the cognitive infrastructure its first cigarette and a copy of the Communist Manifesto. ....



.......... By vocally opposing the madness our world is descending into, you are helping to expand consciousness. To whatever extent you draw more attention and awareness to the lies, manipulations and malfeasance that is being inflicted upon our world in facilitation of the agendas of oligarchy and empire, you are expanding consciousness by that much. You are bringing collective human behavior that much closer to real change, whether you’re talking to people in person, making videos, holding demonstrations, distributing pamphlets, tweeting, blogging, spray painting the truth on an overpass or yelling it at a street corner. .....



So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online. .....

.... Indeed, this report is just another example of the way western powers are behaving more and more like the autocracies they claim to despise, all in the name of preserving the values the west purports to uphold. 

... The problem with “western values” is that the west doesn’t value them.

In reality, those who best exemplify “western values” as advertised are the ones who are being most aggressively silenced and marginalized by western powers. The real journalists. The dissidents. The skeptics. The free thinkers. The peace activists. Those who refuse to bow down to their rulers. ...



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

A smattering



Although it’s not the only thing I produce content on, I’ve become rather invested in the gender debate. I believe that the truth surrounding these issues not only really matters, but has far-reaching implications for women and children’s safeguarding, culture, law, medicine, academia, sports and more.

I’ve developed a keen dislike of gender ideology for the same reasons I’ve been committed to opposing most forms of fundamentalist religion—namely that it is faith-based, hostile to free speech, anti-science and threatens the rights of women. It is worth stressing at this point that this is not a description of trans people as a whole or in general. Most trans people just want to get on with their lives and pose no threat or problem to anyone. And many (I suspect most) do not subscribe to the lunacy of gender ideology either.

What I am referring to is an activist movement that is overwhelmingly non-trans. A movement that will not be happy until everyone is compelled to accept their delusions about sex and gender. ....



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


There are broadly two views of the situation we human are in.

The first is that what is happening is just a result of human nature. It is who we are. We are stupid, short sighted, and profoundly cruel to each other and to other living beings. Our history is of war and rape and torture. In Tudor times they would cut open a person’s belly, and burn their intestines while they were still alive. Crowds would gather, and turn the occasion into a celebration.

Environmental destruction is old, too. Mesopotamia was not a desert once, but we made it into one.

There are those who look to the time before agriculture made possible the rise of kings and nobles and see it as better, and there is some truth to that, but there was violence then, too. The Kings domesticated us, turned us into sheep, and except when they turn us on each other there is less violence now, but, then a shepherd doesn’t want his animals to fight each other: they exist to be shorn, and to die to feed the shepherd.

Humans are, in this view, too stupid, mean and shortsighted to be more than animals. No smarter than bacteria in petri dish, who expand until they choke to death on their waste.

It may be that this view is correct.

There is a second view, however, which says that humans might be able to learn wisdom, foresight and kindness, and might be able to make that scale in both space and time. That we might be able to avoid the generational cycles of rise and fall; that we might learn to shape ourselves into a race which isn’t stunningly cruel, stupid and foolish.

This isn’t a utopian view. ......
 
.... We live in cycles of abuse and powerlessness, and have given away our responsibilities to those of us who are the worst. No serial killer is as evil as a President, or a CEO of a major bank or oil company. They have not killed nearly as many people, after all, nor hurt as many. But their killing, their cruelty, is that of a sheep against other sheep, and the sheep cry out that only the shepherd is allowed to kill and be cruel.

We are faced, today, with our the power we have created thru technology, science and our domestication. We have become instruments of a few people: the cruelest and worst of us, but they rule because we have been made tame, and we have learned to see the world they way they do: that their power is legitimate and that we must acquiesce. They could enforce none of it if we did not acquiesce and if they did not have their sheepdogs. ............................



I’m not sure how many of my readers have noticed the massive realignment going on right now at the foundations of the industrial economy. Venture below the towering abstractions of notional wealth that fill business websites, all the way to the base, and you’ll find that the whole gargantuan structure rests on certain relationships between individuals and the economy. Most people in the industrial world participate in economic activities in two ways: selling their time and labor to businesses as employees, and buying goods and services from businesses as consumers. That’s the base from which the whole tottering mess rises.

What we’re seeing now is that a growing number of people have lost interest in continuing to fill those particular roles. Intractable labor shortages are becoming the norm in today’s industrial societies. Part of that is a function of the soaring number of people who are struggling with bad health just now—no, we don’t have to get into why that’s happening—but not all of it. At the same time, the consumer side of the equation is also collapsing, and stores are floundering as inventory builds up and sales slump.  Quite a bit of that is a function of the wicked blend of inflation and recession that’s got the global economy in its grip, but again, that’s not all of it.

You can catch a whisper of what else is going on if you listen to the frequent rants heard from the managerial class these days about how young people just don’t want to work any more. Talk to the young people in question and you’ll find that quite a few of them are working very hard on projects of their own. What they’re not willing to do is waste their lives working in abusive and humiliating environments to make someone else rich, in exchange for rock-bottom wages, no prospect for advancement, and no benefits worth mentioning. That their reaction comes as a surprise to anyone is a good measure of just how detached our society’s comfortable classes have become from the reality their preferred policies have created.

The same thing is happening on the consumer side of the scale. ......



Pics:





Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)