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Sunday, November 6, 2022

2022-11-06

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


Economic and Market Fare:


.......... 
Jobs Will Be the Absolutely Last Thing to Crack in This Cycle

My view is that:

We will see signs of a slowdown that will give the market hope that we can get a soft landing. This will re-start the “everything” rally (which fell apart after 2:30 pm on Wednesday), but started to claw its way back to life on Friday.

Then we will have the fear of a serious, deep, and longer-term recession.

The second phase would include big hits to employment. While employment is almost always the last bit of economic data to roll over, it will be even slower to react this time around!

..........
Questions Around the Jobs Data

For rent, autos, and a few other things, I’m firmly in the camp that someone at the Fed is “seeing dead people.” For jobs, the data isn’t bad and that doesn’t surprise me because employment will be the last shoe to drop.

Having said that, there are some things about the job market that deserve attention.

In Friday’s NFP Instant Reaction (link), we highlighted a few issues that don’t necessarily show extreme strength in the job market: wages, participation rate, and the large difference between the Household and Establishment Surveys (even considering relative accuracy).

..........
Jobs – Bottom Line

I’m certainly seeing some “dead people” in the jobs data. Maybe I’m looking too closely, but it is easier to paint a less rosy job story than the consensus headlines are portraying.

More importantly, we should not take much solace in the employment data as it will be the absolutely last part of the economy to roll over and by then, it will be too late! We will be Wile E. Coyote realizing that we are standing on air!


Rickards: Look Out Below!

......................... So what could go wrong with the Fed’s approach?

Well, everything.

We know what the Fed is looking at, but it’s likely the Fed’s ignoring other data that may be even more important.

Inverted yield curves in the U.S. Treasury market (from 6-month bills to 10-year notes) and an inverted yield curve in the Eurodollar futures market (long-term bets on short-term rates) are both signs of a potential global liquidity crisis.

This combination was seen in advance of the 2008 global financial crisis. Get ready.

The Fed’s focus on unemployment is also misplaced. There is no Phillips curve effect (the theoretical trade-off between low unemployment and high inflation) so the focus on low unemployment as an inflation indicator is misplaced.

In fact, unemployment is a lagging indicator — it goes up after the recession has started, not before, because employers delay layoffs as long as possible.

As I’ve been repeating for months, the Fed is committing a historic blunder, the latest in a long line since 1913. The Fed is tightening into a coming recession and possible financial crisis. 

Every single time the Fed raised interest rates this quickly in the past, a crisis occurred in either the U.S. or somewhere else in the global economy.

Every single time.

By the time the Fed wakes up this time, the economic damage will be done.



With price inflation rising out of control and interest rates rising strongly, the trading environment for commercial banks has fundamentally changed. With bad debts looming and bond prices in entrenched downtrends, procrastination is now the enemy of bankers.

We are at the beginning of The Great Unwind, and this article elaborates on my first article for Goldmoney on the subject published here. 

The imperative for bankers to respond to these conditions overrides all other matters if their businesses are to survive these changed conditions. We are entering a cyclical downdraft of the bank credit cycle which promises to be cataclysmic. And the monetary policy planners at the central banks can do nothing to stop it. .........

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the CEO of a commercial bank involved in lending to businesses and with profit centres acting in a range of financial activities. As CEO, you are answerable to the board of directors for the bank’s performance, and ultimately the bank’s shareholders for maintaining and advancing the value of their shares. 

Furthermore, let us set this imaginary exercise in the present. These are the issues that should keep you awake at night: 
  • In common with your competitors, the ratio of your balance sheet assets to total equity is almost the highest in the history of the bank, in many cases for other banks over twenty times leaveraged.
  • Official inflation, measured by the CPI is about ten per cent, and producer prices are rising somewhat faster. Your central bank expects a return to the 2% target in two- or three-years’ time. But your contacts at the central bank have privately admitted to you that they cannot imagine the circumstances where this would be true without a deep recession.
  • Bond yields are rising, and losses are beginning to impact on the bank’s investments. The bank has relatively little direct exposure to corporate bonds and equities, but they are commonly held as collateral against customer loans.
  • How are higher interest rates impacting the quality of the bank’s loan book? The bank supported its business customers through the covid pandemic, which increased the indebtedness of them all. This exposes the bank to excessive default risk if rates rise further.
  • The mortgage loan book has been a profitable business for decades. But the bank is beginning to see a material rise in delinquencies. If loan guarantees are not forthcoming from government agencies, the bank may have to shut this activity down.
  • What impact will higher interest rates have on the bank’s derivative exposure? What are the counterparty risks in derivative chains? Derivatives that involve inadequately capitalised counterparties should perhaps be sold on, or where the bank has the option to do so, closed down.
The underlying problem is that the conditions that led to the bank becoming increasingly involved in diversified activities, such as investment banking, trading, and investment management have now changed. Since financial deregulation in the 1980s, the bank has expanded into these profitable areas. The whole industry moved from dealing in credit into generating fee income. The growth in fee income can be directly related to the long-term trend of falling interest rates, which apart from interruptions such as the dot-com excesses and the Lehman crisis, stimulated growth in corporate finance, underwriting, investment management, and trading in financial securities. The expansion of these activities in turn led to a massive expansion of derivative markets, with new instruments being devised, such as credit default and interest rate swaps.



A simplistic, superficial take of today's jobs report would conclude that the red hot jump in nonfarm payrolls indicates a "strong hiring market" (just ignore the jump in the unemployment rate). Nothing could be further from the truth.

Recall that back in August and September, we showed that a stark divergence had opened between the Household and Establishment surveys that comprise the monthly jobs report, and since March the former has been stagnant while the latter has been rising every single month. In addition to that, full-time jobs were plunging while part-time jobs were soaring.

Fast forward to today when the inconsistencies not only continue to grow, but in some cases have becoming downright grotesque.

..... As an aside, it appears this is not the first time the "apolitical" Bureau of Labor Statistics has pulled such a bizarre divergence off: it happened right before Obama's reelection: ...

... And then again: right before Hillary's "100% guaranteed election (because one wouldn't want a soft economy to adversely impact her re-election odds).

.... So what's going on here? The simple answer: there has been no change in the number of people actually employed, but due to deterioration in the economy, more people are losing their higher-paying, full-time jobs, and switching into much lower- paying, benefits-free part-time jobs, which also forces many to work more than one job, a rotation which picked up in earnest some time in March and which has only been captured by the Household survey. Meanwhile the Establishment survey plows on ahead with its politically-motivated approximations, seasonal adjustments, and other labor market goalseeking meant to make the Biden admin look good at least until after the midterms.







***** Tweet Thread of the Week:


Charts: 
1:



...



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

While mapping minerals in Earth’s deserts, the agency’s new detector on the ISS spotted massive contributors to climate change




Using federal data, a study by Nature Canada and the Natural Resources Defense Council shows industry is far from a sustainable, net-zero practice.


........... I believe this kind of reporting and even research is a dangerous trend, perhaps motivated by well-intentioned experts and journalists trying to prevent a situation where the public will just throw up its collective hands and say, “If we’re doomed, why harm ourselves in the time we have left by making life harder, banning air conditioning, cutting water use, getting rid of cheap and efficient gas engines in favor of expensive electric cars or inconvenient mass transit?” Or alternatively, motivated by the. commercial interests — energy companies, arms makers, etc., — that fund many studies and that only generally only care about making money while they can and not really caring if they are contributing to disaster over the longer term.

Left out of such semi-rosy or comfort-inducing reports is the still largely ignored threat of ever-increasing methane releases not just from exposed permafrost regions in Siberia and the northern regions of Alaska and Canada and under the shallow Arctic Ocean, but increasing exposure of ever larger ice-free areas around the edge of Greenland, and the exposure of shallow waters around Antarctica.  Methane, a greenhouse gas 80 or more times as potent molecule for a molecule as CO2, will increasingly wreak havoc with efforts to limit greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

Nor are the impacts of such things as a slowing or even collapse of the Gulf Stream, expansion of desertification, loss of rainforests like in the Amazon region,  and a limit to how many cars can actually be operated with lithium batteries.

Global warming deniers are going extinct, thank heavens, but they are being replaced by supposed “realists” who are saying, essentially, “Calm down folks. Governments, businesses and the public are getting a handle on this problem. Maybe we will have to deal with 2 or 2.5 degrees of increased global temperature by 2100, but we can handle that. ”

My own observations suggest that we aren’t and we can’t.



Other Fare:

Putting back the clocks in November is linked to a spike in car collisions with deer in the US




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:


If Republican candidates do as well as expected on Tuesday, they can credit the new, widespread, and coordinated effort to begin securing U.S. elections, helping give candidates the best opportunity possible to win a fair fight in the new voting environment of mail-in balloting. The Republican National Committee, other party entities, and dozens of public interest election nonprofit groups built over the last two years a multimillion-dollar election integrity infrastructure that passed laws improving voter ID and other election security measures, defended those laws from legal attacks by Democrats, and sued states and localities that failed to follow the law. They also recruited, educated, trained, and placed tens of thousands of new election observers and other workers throughout the long midterm voting season.

And they did it all in one of the most hostile propaganda environments on record. The 2020 election was a massive wake-up call for many Americans on the right. In the months leading up to it, Democrats forced through changes to hundreds of laws and processes governing how elections are conducted. The rule-change scheme was run by Marc Elias, a Democrat election attorney who also ran his party’s Russia collusion hoax ....




More Americans have been working two or more jobs over the past few decades, census data shows


Overcrowding, violence and abuse proliferate at jails across the country, as staffing problems make long-simmering problems worse.







Unsustainability / Climate Fare:





............ If you’re smart, you already recognize that the laws of physics are fine-tuned to enable biological life. I don’t mean that someone necessarily programmed the laws of physics in such a manner as to enable biological life, for all I know there are other universes out there with physical constants that don’t enable biological life. Rather, I mean that the reason you can walk around right now is because the laws of physics are compatible with your existence. Tweak the physical constants subtly and you could not exist.

A similar thing is true for our climate. Agriculture is difficult. It requires a stable predictable climate, with various environmental variables tuned to the right position.....




"Confabulation is a symptom of various memory disorders in which made-up stories fill in gaps"
As COP27 in Egypt nears, it is release time for a cascade of reports, film documentaries, books and pledges of action. Some of the more actively covered or uncovered reports in recent weeks include a stunning Met Office (UK weather center) archived forecast and a reversal of doomsaying from author David Wallace-Wells.

In May 1992, when the Earth Summit saw the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), atmospheric CO2 concentration was 359.99 ppm. I remember some of the earliest COP conferences when the target to limit atmospheric concentration for CO2 was 450 ppm. It would be many years later that Bill McKibben and 350.org said no, 450 was far too high. We need to get back below 350. Jawboning numbers did not seem to help. In 2016 we passed 400. We are now around 415. Though that seems a big, scary number, CO2 concentrations could easily pass 500 ppm in a few years, and even reach 2,000 by 2250, unless something changes.

In 2020, the Met Office produced a hypothetical weather forecast for 23 July 2050 based on UK climate projections. This past 23 July was shockingly almost identical, only 28 years too early. The Met Office says that massive increases in computer power since the 1970s have allowed it to predict climate over the next 100 to 1,000 years with ever greater precision, even for local areas. That it would still be off in its 2020 predictions by heat arriving 28 years too early is troubling. 

Its most recent findings are that even if emissions were cut sharply, the world will see a 50% increase in wildfires and significant sea level rise this century. Assuming the mid-range scenario for emissions cuts, which is deemed most likely, temperatures will be in the region of 3 to 3.5°C by 2100. A business-as-usual scenario would place temperature rise closer to 5 degrees worldwide. 

German psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer coined the term “confabulation” in 1900. He used it to describe when a person gives false answers or answers that sound fantastical or made up. Confabulation is a symptom of various memory disorders in which made-up stories fill in gaps.

As Yogi Berra said, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The Met Office and Wallace-Wells are not to be faulted for trying to get it right. Readjusting your forecasts year-by-year based on the latest data is laudable. What I find puzzling is the persistent failure to account for the exponential function. .........

........ What would 5 degrees look like? Could it come as soon as 2040 or 2050? When you play with exponents, you are juggling high explosives. The recent Climate Endgame report from PNAS warned we have not been studying the worst-case scenarios.

There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic. We could enter such “endgames” at even modest levels of warming.… Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.





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





Freedom to choose.

.... In the early days, indeed, it was all about proving I/we were right and we needed to convince as many as people as possible to avoid a human catastrophe.

But, for well over a year now, my position has been one of being an independent, evidence-based source of information for those who want it and only them.

I am not interested in winning arguments.

I am not interested in debunking pro-narrative analyses.

I am not interested in “converting” normies.

I am not interested in saving humanity (or even society).

None of this matters *as long as* we have freedom of choice. I wish all readers of my Substack the freedom to choose whether they believe what I write and act accordingly or choose not to.

The only thing that we should fight for is freedom of choice. An obvious precursor to this is freedom of speech.


This lengthy excerpt from my COVID vaccine side effect guide is a review of the science that will be useful to anyone trying to understand the causes of these side effects.

....... I believe spike protein toxicity is the most universal reaction to the vaccines. Whereas autoimmunity is not a typical response to them, circulating spike protein is the universal response. The most likely mechanisms of spike protein toxicity are in acting as a pore-forming toxin, increasing the production of breakdown-resistant clots, and binding to ACE2 receptors to drive increases in hypertension. Spike protein toxicity and autoimmunity are not mutually exclusive, but the causation starts with the spike protein. Spike protein toxicity will cause tissue damage, and tissue damage often causes autoimmunity.


Ty & Charlene Bollinger discuss their new nine part docu-series

Docu-series “Propaganda Exposed [UNCENSORED]” Blows the Lid off Collusion, Corruption, and Conspiracy between Government, Tech & Pharma



CO-VIDs of the Week:

***** Covid Amnesty
"But the thing is: We didn’t know." - Emily Oster


...



Anecdotal Fare:

The covid-19 vaccine is the smoking gun in his life-altering surgical emergency, a renowned covid doctor and researcher says.



Amnesty Pushback Fare:


A lot of folks on my side of the aisle are taking a run at this godawful Atlantic article, where one of the more prominent COVID hysterics calls for an “amnesty” for those who overreacted to the virus. Suffice it to say that those of us who suffered through the threat of losing our livelihoods are unlikely to forget and forgive any time soon. For me, my anger is compounded by the fact that most of the lies and manipulations raining down on society from the CDC were directly in my professional wheelhouse, so I see the whole thing as basically the degradation and ritual humiliation of microbiology as a science. The amount of horror inflicted on humanity by people purporting to understand viruses and immunology is frankly incalculable, and it’s difficult to grok how the mask psychos think they can just go “my bad” and have things go back to normal. ....



A recent article in The Atlantic, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” has been making waves in the Covid dissident community. I will add just a few notes to devastating commentaries by Eugyppius (part one and part two), Madhava Setty, M.D., el gato malo, and others. I realize many of my readers are not interested in anything Covid, but the point I intend to make applies far beyond this particular issue.

The article, written by Brown University economics professor Emily Oster, proposes that we forgive and forget the crimes against the public perpetrated during the Covid years. Her main argument seems to be that they weren’t really crimes, they were just the result of ignorance. We were “in the dark,” she says. “We didn’t know” yet that social distancing was ineffective, that cloth masks were useless, that school closures were unnecessary and harmful, that vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, and so forth. Honest mistakes should not be punished.

Leaving aside for a moment that fact that quite a few of us did know, and were ridiculed and censored by people like Emily Oster and publications like The Atlantic, we can agree that honest mistakes should not be punished. We might even question whether punishment is necessarily the right response to legal or moral transgression. There is something much more important than seeing the guilty punished: It is to make sure the crimes don’t happen again.

With that goal in mind, the first question is “Why?” Why did the majority of Americans, and an even larger majority of educated people like Professor Oster, not know the truth? The main reason “we” were in the dark is that we were purposely kept there, through coordinated propaganda and censorship. (A second, more important “why” question is “Why were we so susceptible to that propaganda to begin with?”)

Herein lies the problem with the kind of amnesty Professor Oster advocates. It allows the architects and cheerleaders of Covid madness to stay in power, and the processes by which they commandeered science, government, and media to remain shrouded in darkness. It allows the crimes to happen again.

Professor Oster seems to think that the “misguided policies” of the Covid era arose because we had only “glimmers of information” and could not have known better until The Science eventually settled matters. But the travesty that was Covid policy was not just the result of honest mistakes, it was also the result of corruption and criminality. .....

... So why didn’t she know? It’s not that the information wasn’t available. Oster explains away the dissident community’s early knowledge as lucky guesses, uncanny prescience, and accident—she calls it ”being right for the wrong reasons.” But counter-narrative information is available and always has been, for those willing to see it. We knew because we looked outside approved sources. We “did our own research.” And we were predisposed to do so because we already doubted the soundness of institutional science and the informational and regulatory complex surrounding it. Those like Oster who derive status from that very system rarely question it. 

If Oster and the establishment she represents were willing to ask, “Why didn’t we know, when the information was readily available? How could we have been so blind? How did the information environment become so distorted? Where has my trust been misplaced? Who misled us and why?” then I would be inclined to forgive them. It would show that they have learned something, and might not fall into lockstep with the next authoritarian terror campaign. When someone asks for forgiveness, one expects they take some kind of responsibility for their mistake. Otherwise they are just excusing themselves. ....

.... 
The invisible workings of the Covid machine must be laid bare if we are to prevent something similar from happening again. People and institutions must become cognizant of the role they played in the social catastrophe that was Covid. I will support amnesty when universities admit that they coerced young people to take unnecessary and dangerous vaccines. I will support amnesty when Pfizer describes how it manipulated data to get its shots approved. I will support amnesty when regulators confess that they allowed shoddy vaccine manufacturing processes to proceed without oversight. I will support amnesty when medical boards and hospitals acknowledge that they expelled doctors for using beneficial therapies. I will support amnesty when the FDA admits that it removed helpful drugs from the market. I will support amnesty when social media platforms acknowledge that they censored important, true information. I will support amnesty when fired workers are reinstated with back pay. I will support amnesty when the state of Rhode Island reinstates my wife as a licensed acupuncturist. I will support amnesty when the government acknowledges vaccine damage and compensates the victims. I will support amnesty when regulatory agencies are freed of corporate influence. I will support amnesty when vaccines are subjected to long-term, robust scientific study to determine safety and efficacy. I will support amnesty when mainstream media gives attention to the dissidents and whistleblowers it has ignored and ridiculed. I will support amnesty when brave, conscientious doctors like Peter McCullough and Meryl Nass are reinstated by professional organizations and medical boards. I will support amnesty when a moratorium is declared on genetically engineered bioweapons research, and its full extent made transparent to the public. These are the kinds of things that would have to happen for me to trust that amnesty wouldn’t mean license to repeat the crimes, again with the excuse of “We didn’t know.”

OK, Professor Oster, you didn’t know. Do you know now? Show us. Make the effort to get to the bottom of why you didn’t know. Believe me that I speak for many when I say, truly: We do not want revenge. We don’t want to gloat. We don’t want to keep score. We want this never to happen again.



By now, everybody and his uncle has seen Emily Oster’s plea for “pandemic amnesty” in The Atlantic magazine, a house organ of the people in America who know better than you do about… really… everything. Emily’s wazoo is so stuffed with gold-plated credentials (BA, PhD, Harvard; economics prof at Brown U) it’s a wonder that she could sit down long enough to peck out her lame argument that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

Emily wasn’t “in the dark.” She had access to the same information as the Americans who recognized that everything the public health authorities, the medical establishment, and many elected officials shoveled out about Covid and its putative remedies and preventatives was untrue, with a patina of bad faith and malice — especially when it was used to persecute their political adversaries. ...

..... How did it happen that the thinking class destroyed thinking and betrayed itself? Because the status competition for moral posturing in the sick milieu of the campus became more important to them than the truth.



Pushback Fare:

Gill accused her detractors of being a 'pack of hyenas' bent on destroying her reputation, but it proved to be a very expensive counter-attack

When a host of doctors, academics and journalists criticized her COVID vaccine-doubting, anti-lockdown views, Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill struck back, filing a $12-million libel suit against them. 

... A judge this week ordered the pediatrician in Brampton, west of Toronto, to pay the defendants as much as $1.1 million in legal costs after her lawsuit was struck down earlier this year as a potential curb on important public debate. 




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:


.....“Somebody had the courage to advocate for no nuclear war with Russia, and the crowd responded by chanting ‘Obama’? Imagine having your head shoved so far up your favorite politician’s asshole that you would turn on a person who is against nuclear war.”

Obama’s designation as the “Father of the Ukraine War” stems from his administration’s support for the 2014 coup in Ukraine that triggered war with Russia.

The coup resulted from large-scale protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square that were directed against Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych who spurned an IMF proposal that would have pushed austerity measures on Ukraine.

............ In today’s political landscape, Barack Obama remains a hero to many who regard themselves as liberals and leftists because he was the first Black president, and also because he stood up to the extremism of the GOP. But although he certainly was the first Black president, Obama did not in reality stand up to the extremism of the GOP.

On the contrary, Obama repeatedly caved in to Republican pressure and failed to propose, let alone support and pass, the progressive legislation that he campaigned on—and which he could have easily passed since his party controlled both the House and Senate for more then two years. Instead, he used his presidential power to launch five brutal, bloody—and illegal—wars against Third World countries and set the world on a path to potential nuclear war by ordering Victoria Nuland and the CIA to stage the 2014 Ukrainian coup, while then sponsoring the dirty war in eastern Ukraine.




A Database of Military, Financial and Humanitarian Aid to Ukraine



Tweets:


QOTW:

Johnson: The United States and the United Kingdom continue to insist stridently that they are reliable allies of Kiev and will keep the aid flowing. But those promises become more hollow with each passing day as domestic political and economic problems mount in Washington and London. The Ukrainians, like the Vietnamese and the Afghanis, are likely to learn in the near future that a Western promise to “have your back” is empty.


Other Geopolitical Fare:

Aaron Good on the deep state's 'legacy of ashes.'



The single largest contingent of readers of my essays is in the United States, and it is for their particular benefit that I open today’s piece with some concrete facts on how Europe’s self-imposed energy crisis resulting from the ban on import of Russian hydrocarbons is making it impossible for your average citizen of France, Belgium and many other countries in the EU to make ends meet. I hasten to add that the unworkable arithmetic of monthly household finance is day by day, week by week bringing us to the social unrest and political instability that I and others have been predicting ever since the trend lines on cost of living became clear some months ago. .....





Orwellian Fare:

Hayes: Pure Evil

Everything is relative except maybe the speed of light. So, when I proclaim that Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) are pure evil, the next logical question is — from whose perspective? What is evil to some is pure goodness to others.

The three players in this sad tragedy are:
  • “We the people”, or those who are governed.
  • The government and the political elites that pull the strings.
  • Commercial banks chartered by the government of a particular nation state.
To us people, CBDCs represent a full-frontal assault on our ability to have sovereignty over honest transactions between ourselves. To the government, it is the most perfect tool for modifying the behaviour of its subjects since we all decided to voluntarily upload our lives onto social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. To the banks, CBDCs represent an existential threat to their existence as going concerns. 

I believe that the apathy of the majority will allow governments to easily take away our physical cash and replace it with CBDCs, ushering in a utopia (or dystopia) of financial surveillance. But, we have an unlikely ally that I believe will impede the government’s ability to implement the most effective CBDC architecture for controlling the general populace — and that ally is the domestic commercial banks. ......




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


....................... We’ve been seeing this same cycle repeated year after year: US military expansionism and aggression in a given part of the world receives pushback from the people who live there, and the US responds to that pushback with more military expansionism and aggression. The official narrative is that the US is responding to unprovoked aggressions from the other side, conveniently omitting its own antecedent aggressions and provocations — a manipulation tactic the western media are always happy to facilitate. 

In reality it’s not hard to determine who the aggressor is when one party is flying to the other side of the planet to menace the borders and security interests of the other, especially when ramping up militarism in more and more parts of the world facilitates both the US military-industrial complex and the unipolarist objectives of US empire managers. But because the US empire has the most sophisticated narrative control system ever devised, enough people in enough places that matter swallow the official story despite its self-evident absurdity. 

A system which perpetuates and exacerbates itself while pretending to solve the problems it creates is often called a self-licking ice cream cone. Because that type of system is promoted by those serving the most powerful and belligerent power structure on earth, one might call US militarism a self-licking boot. ....



❖

It is false to claim that capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature”. I cite as my source for this claim the fact that I am human. The truth is that those who claim capitalism, competition and greed are “human nature” are not actually telling you anything about human nature. They are telling you about their own nature.

And it isn’t even really accurate to call it their “nature”; it’s just their conditioning. And we can all change our conditioning. The only people who deny this are those who haven’t sincerely tried to yet.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:



A clue: no. (Plus: 'sophisticated theology', a friend who would kill me, and why Tom Holland is wrong.)

As a good old-fashioned New Atheist type, I have long been of the view that religion is most certainly not good for humanity. At best, it is irrelevant to the task of creating happy, free, and prosperous societies. At worst, it is an enemy of truth and a driver of hatred and conflict.

Let’s take truth first. The question at hand isn’t really about the veracity or otherwise of religion, but I think most people would consider truth, all else being equal, to be a good thing for humanity, as I do. This is by no means a given, I concede, and we shall have to skate over difficult metaphysical and epistemological questions about what exactly we mean by ‘truth’. But if we believe that truth (meaning, broadly, the accurate understanding of reality) is good, then religion, almost by definition, cannot be good for us.

I’m not one of those milquetoast atheists who hedges their bets, let alone a respectably stuffy agnostic. No, I think one can say, with great confidence, that Christianity, Islam, and the rest are utterly false. We know, and even believers have had to admit, that all the holy books are riddled with historical error, scientific illiteracy, and contradiction. ....

If religion was our earliest, most feeble attempt to understand reality, it has long been superseded by the discoveries of science and the inquiries of philosophy. ‘Sophisticated theologians’, to employ Jerry Coyne’s deliciously condescending term, might be able to rescue their faith by making it so symbolic and abstract that their god might as well not exist (“the ground of all being” and all that), but this is hardly stirring or convincing stuff. Such theologians are as wrong, wrong, wrong as the most doltish of creationists, and the contortions of their attempts to salvage the unsalvageable simply reinscribe the falsehood of their starting point.1 They make that which is merely wrong into something that is not even wrong. ....



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