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Friday, November 11, 2022

2022-11-09

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Why is the Bank of England making the expected UK recession worse?

............ If we take this forecast seriously, and we presume the Bank does, then there is little need for rates to increase further than 3%, and we would expect the Bank to start cutting rates by 2024 at the latest. The reason to expect this is that inflation is undershooting its target by the end of 2025, suggesting unemployment of 5% is too high to achieve stable inflation. We will have gone from an overly tight labour market to one which is overly weak. Interest rates influence inflation with a significant lag, so to stop this undershooting and get a stronger recovery interest rates need to start falling by 2024 if not before.

This observation invites another. Rather than raising rates now, and creating a significant recession, only to have to cut them again after a year or two, wouldn’t it be more sensible to not to raise rates by so much right now? .....

The Bank might argue that this will only happen if interest rates are increased now, because otherwise the inflation target loses credibility. But as Olivier Blanchard observes here, the lags in the economic system mean a central bank should stop raising rates while inflation is still increasing. If a central bank believes it will lose credibility by doing this, and feels it has to continue raising rates until inflation starts falling, this will lead to substantial monetary policy overkill and an unnecessarily recession. ...


FRBSF: Monetary Policy Stance Is Tighter than Federal Funds Rate
The Federal Reserve’s use of forward guidance and balance sheet policy means that monetary policy consists of more than changing the federal funds rate target. A proxy federal funds rate that incorporates data from financial markets can help assess the broader stance of monetary policy. This proxy measure shows that, since late 2021, monetary policy has been substantially tighter than the federal funds rate indicates. Tightening financial conditions are similar to what would be expected if the funds rate had exceeded 5¼% by September 2022.




There is beautiful irony in macroeconomics, a sort of inherent Minsky dynamic, or universal Goodhart law, that means that just when everyone thinks something is definitively true, it turns out to be spectacularly false. In fact, worse than that, the false belief usually sows the seeds of its own destruction. Our whole pseudo-science is susceptible to that famous Mark Twain quote “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." 

We see this most clearly in the long pendulum swings between fiscal and monetary orthodoxy. Just when the Keynesians think they have won the argument, they have to face their historic nemesis - stagflation. And when policymakers think they can solve all the world’s problem with monetary policy alone, they always end up in some version of the liquidity trap. We also see these dynamics on a more granular level. Ignore the banking system, as the authorities did in the early 2000s, find yourself in a banking crisis. Regulate the banks, and push financial bubbles into shadow banking and institutional investors. Financial markets are viral. To control is to distort.



Charts: 
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Bubble Fare:


.... So, where does this leave the stock market? Stocks do not bottom when equities valuations equal 150% of the overall economy (TMC/GDP). During the 2000 recession, the NASDAQ bottomed at 71% TMC/GDP, down from 142% at the high. The Great Recession saw stocks bottom at 45% TMC/GDP, down from 105%. Even during the Pandemic recession, TMC/GDP fell from 152% to 120%. All those bottoms were associated with a Fed that was rapidly cutting interest rates to 1% or below. And in the case of 2008 & 2020 recessions, the Fed was engaged in the massive money printing scheme known as Quantitative Easing as well. Market bottoms do not occur just because the Fed reduces the pace of rate hikes from 75bp to 50bp increments. Every Recession in the past has been dealt with by massive monetary and fiscal stimuli. But with inflation at close to a record high, it is simply tying the government’s hands.

And, please do not think that government and central banks can automatically boost asset prices at will—no matter how hard they try. For example, China’s Shanghai stock exchange is still down 50% from its 2007 peak; and Japan’s NIKKEI Dow is down 30% from its top reached 33 years ago. Those figures are in nominal terms!

Let us look at some of the latest economic data to affirm that GDP is getting weaker by the day and point to a recession that is going to be brutal: ...



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

........... And failure to get emissions on the right trajectory by 2030 may lock global warming above 2 degrees celsius and risk catastrophic tipping points—where climate change becomes self-perpetuating.

According to major study, the world is on the brink of multiple “disastrous” tipping points. The study shows five dangerous tipping points that may already have been passed due to the 1.1C of global heating caused by humanity to date.  These include the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap, eventually producing a huge sea level rise, the collapse of a key current in the north Atlantic, disrupting rain upon which billions of people depend for food, and an abrupt melting of carbon-rich permafrost.  At 1.5C of heating, the minimum rise now expected, four of the five tipping points move from being possible to likely, the analysis said. Also at 1.5C, an additional five tipping points become possible, including changes to vast northern forests and the loss of almost all mountain glaciers ......

But the glacial pace of action means meeting even this temperature limit was not credible, the UN report said.  Instead, the report found that existing carbon-cutting policies would cause 2.8C of warming, while pledged policies cut this to 2.6C.  ......

Private finance won’t decarbonise the planet – only public investment can do so argues leftist economist Daniela Gabor. “We cannot rely on private finance to lead us out of a climate crisis it has systematically contributed to. We have to disempower carbon financiers, and we do that by making the democratic state – not investors – lead the way forward.”  ........





GeoPolitical Fare:

********** Streeck: Getting Closer

On 17 October, Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz invoked his constitutional privilege under Article 65 of the Grundgesetz to ‘determine the guidelines’ of his government’s policy. Chancellors do this rarely, if at all; the political wisdom is three strikes and you’re out. At stake was the lifespan of Germany’s last three nuclear power plants. As a result of Merkel’s post-Fukushima turn, intended to pull the Greens into a coalition with her party, these are scheduled by law to go out of service by the end of 2022. Afraid of nuclear accidents and nuclear waste, and also of their well-to-do middle-class voters, the Greens, now governing together with SPD and FDP, refused to give up their trophy. The FDP, on the other hand, demanded that given the current energy crisis, all three plants – accounting for about six percent of the domestic German electricity supply – be kept in operation as long as needed, meaning indefinitely. To end the fighting, Scholz issued an order to the ministries involved, formally declaring it government policy that the plants continue until mid-April next year, par ordre du mufti, as German political jargon puts it. Both parties knuckled under, saving the coalition for the time being.

The Greens – recently called ‘the most hypocritical, aloof, mendacious, incompetent and, measured by the damage they cause, the most dangerous party we currently have in the Bundestag’ by the indestructible Sahra Wagenknecht – are rather more afraid of nuclear power than nuclear arms. Anesthetized by the rapidly rising number of Green fellow-travellers in the media and mesmerized by fantasies of Biden delivering Putin to The Hague to stand trial in the international criminal court, the German public refuses to consider the damage nuclear escalation in Ukraine would cause, and what it would mean for the future of Europa and, for that matter, Germany (a place many German Greens do not consider particularly worth protecting anyway). 

....... Not that ‘the West’ is not preparing for nuclear war. ..........

Those disposed to undertake a close reading of the public pronouncements of the governing coalition of the willing can recognize traces of debates going on behind the scenes, over how best to prevent the Great Unwashed getting in the way of what may be coming to them. On 21 September, one of the chief editors of FAZ, Berthold Kohler, a hardliner if there ever was one, noted that even among Western governments ‘the unthinkable is no longer considered impossible’. Rather than allowing themselves to be blackmailed, however, Western ‘statesmen’ have to muster ‘more courage… if the Ukrainians insist on liberating their entire country’, an insistence that we have no right to argue with. Any ‘arrangement with Russia at the expense of the Ukrainians’ would amount to ‘appeasement’ and ‘betray the West’s values and interests’, the two happily converging. To reassure those of his readers who would nevertheless rather live for their families than die for Sevastopol – and who had hitherto been told that the entity called ‘Putin’ is a genocidal madman entirely impervious to rational argument – Kohler reports that in Moscow there is sufficient fear of ‘the nuclear Armageddon in which Russia and its leaders would burn as well’ for the West to support to the hilt the Zelensky view of the Ukrainian national interest. .........

In other respects as well, the corridor of the sayable is rapidly, and frighteningly, narrowing. As with the destruction of the pipelines, the strongest taboos relate to the role of the United States, both in the history of the conflict and in the present. ........

What is nothing short of astonishing is how many hawks have come out of their nests in recent months in Germany. Some figure as ‘experts’ on Eastern Europe, international politics and the military, who believe it to be their Western duty to help the public deny the approaching reality of nuclear explosions on European territory; others are ordinary citizens who suddenly enjoy following tank battles on the internet and rooting for ‘our’ side. Some of the most warlike used to belong to the left, widely defined; today they are more or less aligned with the Green party and in this emblematically represented by Baerbock, now the foreign minister. A strange combination of Joan of Arc and Hillary Clinton, Baerbock is one of the many so-called ‘young global leaders’ cultivated by the World Economic Forum. What is most characteristic of her version of leftism is its affinity to the United States, by far the most violence-prone state in the contemporary world. ........

Of course, in order to make ordinary people rally to the cause, effective ‘narratives’ must be devised to convince them that pacifism is either treason or a mental illness. ....



Sci Fare:

For most of human evolution, multiple species with different ways of walking upright coexisted



Other Fare:




Pics of the Week:

A growing catalog of huge but dim galaxies such as Dragonfly 44 is forcing astronomers to invent new theories of galactic evolution.




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:

We should have walked out on the Democratic Party and mounted a serious opposition movement while we still had a chance.

The bipartisan project of dismantling our democracy, which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich, has left only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d’état is over. They won. We lost. ....

........ Biden, morally vacuous and of limited intelligence, is responsible for more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump. But the victims in our Punch-and-Judy media shows are rendered invisible. And that is why the victims despise the whole superstructure and want to tear it down. .....

Biden and other establishment politicians are not actually calling for democracy. They are calling for civility. They have no intention of extracting the knife thrust into our backs. They hope to paper over the rot and the pain with the decorum of the polite, measured talk they used to sell us the con of neoliberalism.  ....



Is there a more preposterous notion warbled across this troubled nation than the campaign mantra that “Joe Biden,” and the claque concealed behind him, are defending our democracy? What could be more self-evidently untrue?

..... If what they’re doing is obvious, why they’re doing it isn’t. I have only two theories: Either 1) the Party of Chaos is acting in the interests of sinister forces outside our polity; or 2) They’re so far gone ethically and so deep in criminality carried out by so many persons and agencies in their service, that everything you see them do now is some attempt to cover-up their crimes or distract from their discovery.

The correct answer is probably both. One way or another, Davos money and influence worms its way through US institutions and works its wicked will ....



...... I watched the US 2020 elections with interest. There were, for me at any rate, a significant number of alarm bells going off in the run up and on the night itself. Obviously, I’m one of those people who wish to destroy democracy because I’m not at all wholly convinced there wasn’t widespread manipulation and fraud going on.

.... In my view, for example, anyone who thinks an election can be properly secured via mass mail-in ballots is either duplicitous, or a moron (or possibly both).

.... Anyone calling for relaxation of the requirements of authentication in an election process must be viewed with extreme suspicion. ........



................ The Democrats’ democracy-or-death mantra is not just demagoguery. It is defamation of a constitutional system that has proven itself, time and again, to be up to any challenge. Democrats indeed may be in danger in this midterm — but democracy is not.



The US midterm elections are nigh and, as I happen to be a good and patriotic Russian national, it behooves me to meddle in them. Election-meddling is an example of Russia’s soft power, which is much nicer than Russia’s hard power, so you should be glad that it’s still on offer.

I am on record saying that “The United States is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is president” multiple times in multiple places, and I stand by that statement, which I believe to be a provable statement of fact. Statistics show that there is zero correlation between public preferences and public policy decisions but a strong correlation between business lobby group preferences and pubic policy decisions. Thus the US is not a democracy (rule by the people) but an oligopoly (rule by business groups). From this it follows that it doesn’t matter who is president because both parties of the Democrat-Republican duopoly are owned by the same set of business groups.

And so it doesn’t matter who is president and your vote means nothing? Granted; but then does it matter WHETHER there is a president? Methinks, it does!

What if the president is an organo-servo-robot, a senile puppet, backed up by a vice president specifically chosen for being even more feeble-minded? ......



Unsustainability Fare:


Climate change and covid are revealing an ongoing inability for our society to make wise decisions in the face of calamity, which may be leading us to a collapse of our civilization. Perhaps if we accept (or just believe) that we’re nearing the end, we can shift our priorities enough to usher in a more peaceful and equitable denouement.

Some recent climate change articles are painting a bleak picture. ...


Once the domain of end-of-timers and right-wing radicals, the survivalist mindset is pushing into the mainstream thanks to rising climate-change disasters and civil unre


The Trump era has messed with everyone’s head. Including, it seems, Wendell Berry’s.



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


A summary of excess deaths represented by every continent.

Let’s start with the COVID version of pin the tail on the donkey! Can you identify these points on the chart below?
  1. The introduction of COVID measures that delayed the spread of the virus, saving millions of lives until the miracle vaccine is available?
  2. The introduction of said miracle vaccine, saving tens of millions more lives...?

My analyses of excess mortality in England, Sweden, Germany, USA, South Africa, Australia, and South Korea all show the same pattern - excess deaths are substantially higher since the introduction of the COVID “vaccine” than before. Much more than COVID itself.

These countries have different demographics, different seasons, different pandemic responses, and different excess mortality distributions in terms of timing and magnitude, until...

The one thing they all have in common is the introduction of a medical experiment and various measures to coerce maximum uptake and in the most coincidental coincidence of all coincidences, excess mortality shoots up in synchronicity.


Weird, isn’t it?

It’s almost like COVID itself has no impact until governments start meddling in people’s lives with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)?

And then, rather than an extraordinary drop in excess mortality after the introduction of the experimental therapy claimed to have 90%+ efficacy in reducing mortality, mortality goes up instead? And up, and up, and up. ....


Smalley: The Definitive Guide to Excess Death During the COVID Era
A summary of excess death from around the world. Spoiler alert - Sweden wins.


The somewhat less meaningful COVID death tally (per million population) does not have the same relative magnitude since different countries use different methods for recording what is and what isn’t a COVID death, on top of the fact, of course, that it’s a Pyrrhic victory to mitigate COVID deaths at the expense of higher excess non-COVID deaths.

So, Sweden even beat neighbour Norway in the end. And, as you can see in the charts below, Norway is still heading in the wrong direction. So too are Australia and New Zealand. Their cumulative excess death tally has less COVID in it than other countries but they are getting their COVID add-ons now.

My analysis of each country leads me to three main conclusions:
  1. COVID exists and is deadly. This is evident given the very strong and consistent correlations between weekly excess deaths and weekly reported COVID deaths. I think it is also important to accept this fact given that there is very little resistance now to the assertion that COVID was manufactured in a biolab. Those responsible for making it are responsible for the millions of deaths it has caused.
  2. Experimental attempts at mitigating the spread of the virus through various “social distancing” measures, including school and business closures, imprisoning healthy people in their homes, forced wearing of masks, etc. show very little evidence of benefit. Any specious evidence from prison islands (Australia and New Zealand) is ultimately proven futile as predicted by the world’s two best epidemiologists (Giesecke and Tegnell). The harms of these interventions are also apparent in the ultimate excess death numbers. Those responsible for implementing them should be held accountable for the deaths they have caused.
  3. The only thing that could have made COVID worse was to put the same people responsible for making it in charge of making the antidote. It’s a bit like putting the arsonists in charge of fire policy after they have burnt down the city. But that’s what happened with COVID. It is abundantly clear that there is no reduction in COVID deaths as a result of the mass administration of the experimental “vaccine”. Moreover, as we should logically expect deficits in periods after excess mortality such as occurred in the nine months prior to the medical experiment, and greater protection from herd immunity, and the natural selection of less virulent variants, it is difficult to argue against the allegation that the experiment has somehow contributed to the perpetuation of COVID rather than its demise. This is further supported by the fact that COVID and excess deaths both taper off in line with society’s final realisation that they should take no further part in the experiment.
....


Across the globe, excess deaths are much higher since the COVID "vaccine" was introduced so why isn't this headline news?




USA:

Australia:

South Korea:




COVID Conspiracy Fare:

Graphene oxide? Nanobots?

What is in the Pfizer vaccines? Recently, Dr David Nixon, a Brisbane GP, decided to find out, putting droplets of vaccine and the blood of vaccinated patients under a dark-field microscope.

That’s a more radical decision than it might sound. According to Sasha Latypova, a scientist with 25 years of experience in clinical trials for pharmaceutical companies, the contract between Pfizer and the US government prohibits independent researchers from studying the vaccines. They claim it would ‘divert’ these precious resources away from their intended use fulfilling an ‘urgent’ need.

Is that true in Australia? Who knows? All the Commonwealth Department of Health has said about its contract with Pfizer is that it is commercial-in-confidence.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration performs tests on all Covid vaccines for composition and strength, purity and integrity, identity and endotoxins, but it provides scant details other than the batch numbers tested and whether they passed. (Spoiler alert: they did.)

In the US, the Centers for Disease Control specifically states that all Covid-19 vaccines are free from ‘metals, such as iron, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth alloys’ and ‘manufactured products such as micro-electronics, electrodes, carbon nanotubes, and nanowire semiconductors’.

Notably, this list does not include graphene oxide which has been widely investigated for biomedical applications. Some researchers sing its praises, its ‘ultra-high drug-loading efficiency due to the wide surface area’, its exceptional ‘chemical and mechanical constancy, sublime conductivity and excellent biocompatibility’. But there’s a catch. ‘The toxic effect of graphene oxide on living cells and organs’ is ‘a limiting factor’ on its use in the medicine.

So is there graphene oxide in the Pfizer shots? What Nixon found, and filmed, is bizarre to say the least. Inside a droplet of vaccine are strange mechanical structures. They seem motionless at first but when Nixon used time-lapse photography to condense 48 hours of footage into two minutes, it showed what appear to be mechanical arms assembling and disassembling glowing rectangular structures that look like circuitry and micro chips. These are not ‘manufactured products’ in the CDC’s words because they construct and deconstruct themselves but the formation of the crystals seems to be stimulated by electromagnetic radiation and stops when the slide with the vaccine is shielded by a Faraday bag. Nixon’s findings are similar to those of teams in New Zealand, Germany, Spain and South Korea. 

An Italian group led by Riccardo Benzi Cipelli analysed the blood of over 1,000 people, one month after they were vaccinated, who had been referred for tests because they had experienced side effects. They ranged in age from 15 to 85 and had had between one and three doses. More than 94 per cent had abnormal readings, deformed red blood cells, reduced in counts and clumped around luminescent foreign objects which also attracted clusters of fibrin. Some of the foreign objects dotted the blood like a starry night, some self-assembled into crystalline structures and others into spindly branches and tubes.

The Italians think the objects are metallic particles and say they resemble ‘graphene oxide and possibly other metallic compounds’. They believe the damaged blood is contributing to post-vaccine coagulation disorders, which in turn contribute to increased malignancies, while graphene-family materials are associated with oxidative stress, DNA damage, inflammation and damage to those parts of the immune system that suppress tumours.

The artificial mRNA concoction which is ‘cloaked’ from the recipient’s immune system is also likely to reduce the recipients immune function, increasing the likelihood of new or recurring tumours.

Nixon has shared his findings with Wendy Hoy, professor of medicine at the University of Queensland who has called on the Australian government and its health authorities to explain the apparent spontaneous formation of chips and circuitry in mRNA vaccines when left at room temperature, and the abnormal objects that can be seen in the blood of vaccinated people. Hoy thinks that these are ‘undoubtedly contributing to poor oxygen delivery to tissues and clotting events, including heart attacks and strokes’ and asks why there is no systematic autopsy investigation of deaths to investigate the role of the vaccine in Australia’s dramatic rise in mortality.

According to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, excess mortality was over 17 per cent in July. It is similarly elevated in other highly vaccinated populations. ....



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:

Retracting their call for diplomacy with Russia to end the Ukraine war, Congressional Progressives cave to the neocons.



Q1 – On Wikipedia, you are presented as “pro-Putin” and a “transmitter of his disinformation”. You are ostracized because of your statements on the war in Ukraine, such as “Responsibility for this appalling conflict is widely shared, and Ukrainian and Western provocations cannot be minimized or passed over in silence …. It is a conflict that should have been avoided and in which all actors involved, directly or indirectly, bear their share of responsibility.” Of course, your statements may be highly questionable, but it should be legitimate to express them. In this regard you also denounced that “the Western media have succeeded in establishing a real media totalitarianism, which aims to silence any dissenting voice, to prevent any criticism of Kiev, in particular by systematically passing off those who criticize its actions and those of the Americans as pro-Russian.”  Have we really entered a totalitarianism of thought? Is freedom of expression, typical of western democracies, becoming a collateral casualty of war? 

A1 – This is a very important issue. There is indeed in the presentation of this conflict, a real media totalitarianism of the West. As we observe every day, almost all the Western media and politicians have taken up the cause of Ukraine since 24 February 2022.

But in reality it started as early as the events of 2014 and the real coup that took place in Kiev against Yanukovych. While there was nothing respectable about this man and he was notoriously corrupt – even Vladimir Putin did not like him – he had been legitimately elected in an election supervised and validated by OSCE observers. Maidan is therefore the overthrow of a legal and legitimate regime with the support of Europe and the United States, less than a year before a new election that would have likely removed him from power. This illegal act led to Moscow’s reaction, which re-annexed Crimea to its territory. Similarly, it was Kiev’s discriminatory actions and then its military operations against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass that provoked the Russians to step in. To deny these facts is to subscribe to a Western narrative that totally distorts historical reality.

Similarly, if Russia clearly attacked Ukraine at the beginning of 2022, it did so following a long process of American provocations (refusal to suspend the extension of NATO to the East, refusal to negotiate with Moscow a new security architecture in Europe) and Ukrainian provocations (launching of the offensive in the Donbass on 17 February). Washington knew that Ukraine was a “red line” for the Russians and that they would react. The United States is therefore just as responsible for this conflict as Moscow.

Of course, when one says such things, one is immediately accused of being pro-Russian and of relaying Kremlin propaganda. This is the argument with which Western politicians and media disqualify all those who try to present a version of the facts much closer to reality than their propaganda. 

However, I do not seek to defend Russia, but to produce an analysis as objective as possible of the situation in order to find ways out of the crisis. It also seems essential to me to alert the public opinion on the major manipulation of the information which we are witnessing because of the American and Ukrainian Spin Doctors. But the latter and their European relays (politicians, media, pro-Ukrainian activists) do not want this discourse to be audible and are energetically working to stifle it.

I was a young intelligence officer during the Cold War and I have no illusions about the totalitarian Soviet system against which we fought and which collapsed.

However, in the last thirty years, things have changed. Russia is no longer the USSR. Yet everything is done to ensure that we continue to analyze it through the old prism of the Cold War. Thus, it is necessary to note that for thirty years, the West has not ceased to scorn the Russians, to lie to them, to impose sanctions on them and to give them lessons in “democracy”, while not applying them itself.

The vocation of an intelligence officer is to describe the world as it is and not as he would like it to be. This is why we are often qualified as Cassandras and not listened to by politicians. I make this quote from Jean Jaurès (Discours à la jeunesse, 1903) my own:
“Courage is going for the ideal and understanding the real…Courage is seeking the truth and telling it. Courage is not to suffer the law of the triumphant lie that passes and not to echo, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, the imbecilic applause and the fanatical booing.”
The example of the Ukrainian crisis is a perfect illustration. I have no doubt that in the years or decades to come, history will show that this crisis was deliberately provoked by the United States to weaken Moscow and that the vassalized Europeans obediently followed them to the detriment of their own interests. .......


An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake ‘bot’ accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war



.............. One of Perimeter’s developers, Alexander Zheleznyakov, described a possible scenario for using the system as follows: 

“Two hours after the start of hostilities, when it seemed that there was nothing and, most importantly, no one to fight, in the remote Siberian taiga, in the Kazakh steppes, in the swamps of central Russia, the hatches of mine launchers almost simultaneously opened, and dozens of silver giants rushed into the sky. Thirty minutes later, the fate of Moscow and Leningrad, Kiev and Minsk, Berlin and Prague, Beijing and Havana was shared by Washington and New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Bonn and London, Paris and Rome, Sydney and Tokyo. 

Having suddenly started, the nuclear war ended just as suddenly, destroying everyone. There were no winners or losers......



Orwellian Fare:


This past Monday it was my pleasure to host Richard Gage, who is famous for being one of the two or three people acting as Chief Documentarian after the terrorist event on September 11, 2001 that took place in southern Manhattan. Thankfully, there are many more people playing such a role during the Plandemonium. But Richard takes a unique approach, which is not simply to cover the two events, but to draw parallels that bring to life the techniques and toolkits of the propaganda artists.



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


The commander of the US nuclear arsenal has stated unequivocally that the war in Ukraine is just a warmup exercise for a much larger conflict that’s already in the mail....



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


Do you remember when you were a student? You were supposed to be "trained." The term comes from the Latin trahere, ‘pull,’ and implies that your teachers force you to learn whatever you were supposed to learn. Things change completely when you become a professional. At that stage, you must learn to consult many sources and sift good information from the bad. As a good professional, you listen to everybody and trust nobody. 

We can describe this attitude by the term "grokking," invented by sci-fi author Robert Anson Heinlein to indicate the kind of deep understanding that professionals have of their field. In Heinlein's fictional Mars, "to grok" also means "to drink." You assimilate knowledge just like you assimilate the water you drink. It is strictly related to the concept of "empathy" as discussed by Chuck Pezeshky in his blog. 

In my case, I remember how, as a young scientist, I spent long hours perusing scientific journals in my department's library at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The administrators wisely kept the library open all night for us, students and postdocs, to nibble at the treasure of knowledge stored there. It was the equivalent of what we do today when "surfing the Web", it was just slower and more laborious. But it was a great experience: I soon learned that not all the articles found in scientific journals were inherently trustworthy, nor were the scientists. When I started my career, frauds and lies in science were not so common as they are nowadays, but there were plenty of evident mistakes, unjustified assumptions, sloppy work, or, simply, irrelevant confusion. You had to learn to recognize what's good and what's bad. You need to grok what you read. Those who don't grok, are grokked. They are not experts, at best they follow rules dictated by others.  

Different learning strategies can be described in terms of the structure of the networks involved. In a training environment, schools or universities, you have a "vertical" network in which one of the nodes (the teacher) dominates the others (the students). Information moves "down" from the source to the targets. It may be retained by the targets, but not critically examined ("grokked"). It is the same with the traditional media: TV and newspapers. Information flows "down" from a central control node. In the case of professional learning, instead, you have a "horizontal" network in which all nodes (learners and sources) are approximately on the same level. Information is exchanged bidirectionally and it is critically evaluated by the target.

The "grokking-style" learning can be defined with a single sentence: "listen to everybody, trust nobody." It applies to scientific research, but also to all kinds of information collection in ordinary life. Or, at least, it should apply if you want to really understand what you are learning. You can pass exams in college without having grokked anything of what you regurgitate to your examiners. In the same way, you may think you know what's going on in the world from what you are hearing on TV, but you really have no idea whatsoever about what's really happening. You haven't grokked it. .....

......... The other problem, much more serious, is that if you are a serious grokker, you place yourself outside the mainstream beliefs and views. You become a mystery for everyone who is not using the same information management method. You may find that your friends and family think that you are "strange," that when you walk toward someone you know in the street, she may cross the street to avoid getting close to you. And woe betides those who try to discuss with the non-grokkers. .....

............... In most cases I have no idea about the identities or credentials of the authors, and I could generally care less. The contribution of an anon on 4chan can be every bit as insightful and correct as the analysis of a facefag whose CV I can review in detail. Equivalently, the facefag can be every bit as wrong as that of the shitposter. The salient detail is not the identity of the person originating the information, but the structure of the argument. .....

The purpose of the exercise is rather to discern the model of reality that produced the perspective leading to the information being organized as it has been. ...........

The normies still trapped in the mass media holodeck cling to the certainty that their 'reliable sources' can be trusted, and the result is that they inhabit a nightmare world of shifting illusions that has driven them quite entirely mad.  .....



......................... One of the big questions that is often asked is this: Why are the architects of this shift in the structure of The Matrix doing it? The answer is simple. They are doing it without empathy, or sense of consequence for their actions that exist in their pursuit of power and control. How can they do this to children? The answer is unpleasant — as the Joker in The Dark Knight says “I just DO things.”



Satirical Fare QOTW:

“I am so disappointed with my Grandpa. He is voting Democrat next week.
When he was alive, he was a staunch Republican."


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