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Wednesday, November 23, 2022

2022-11-23

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


Economic and Market Fare:


hat tip, naked capitalism, who says: "Interesting, on r* and models."



Do ‘excessive’ wage rises lead to rising inflation and thus drive economies into a wage-price spiral?  Back in 1865, at the International Working Men’s Association, Marx debated with IWMA Council member Thomas Weston.  Weston, a leader of the carpenter’s union, argued that asking for increased wages was futile because all that would happen would be that employers would put up their prices to maintain their profits and so inflation would quickly eat into purchasing power; real wages would stagnate and workers would be back to square one because of a wage-price spiral.

Marx responded to Weston’s argument firmly.  His reply, which was eventually published as a pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit, was basically as follows.  First, “wage rises generally happen in the track of previous price rises” – it’s a catch-up response, not due to ‘excessive’ and unrealistic demands for higher wages by workers.  Second, it is not wage rises that cause rising inflation.  Many other things affect price changes, Marx argued: namely “the amount of production (growth rates – MR), the productive powers of labour (productivity growth – MR), the value of money (money supply growth – MR), fluctuations of market prices (price setting – MR), and different phases of the industrial cycle” (boom or slump – MR).  

Moreover, “A general rise in the rate of wages will result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but not affect the prices of commodities.”  In other words, wage rises are much more likely to lower the share of income going to profits and thus eventually lower the profitability of capital.  And that is the reason capitalists and their economist prize-fighters oppose wage rises.  The claim that there is a wage-price spiral and that wage rises cause price rises is an ideological smokescreen to protect profitability. 

Was Marx right?  Well, modern mainstream economics has continued to claim that ‘excessive’ wage rises will cause rising inflation and create a wage-price spital.  Take these following views in the current inflation upsurge.  ...

... Well, it may follow from “basic micro and commonsense” in mainstream economics.  But it is just plain wrong. ......



While many market participants are concerned about rate increases, they appear to be ignoring the largest risk: the potential for a massive liquidity drain in 2023.

Even though December is almost here, central banks’ balance sheets have hardly, if at all, decreased. Rather than real sales, a weaker currency and the price of the accumulated bonds account for the majority of the fall in the balance sheets of the major central banks.

In the context of governments deficits that are hardly declining and, in some cases, increasing, investors must take into account the danger of a significant reduction in the balance sheets of central banks. Both the quantitative tightening of central banks and the refinancing of government deficits, albeit at higher costs, will drain liquidity from the markets. This inevitably causes the global liquidity spectrum to contract far more than the headline amount.



Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote “The Case for Patience on Inflation”. My view was that the price spikes Americans had experienced were mostly attributable to the interplay of large one-time disruptions to our ability to produce with sharp changes in the mix of goods and services we wanted to buy. Eventually, those disruptions would end and inflation would normalize along with other economic conditions. The danger was that businesses and consumers would alter their behaviors to protect themselves from the risk of inflation in ways that would ultimately make everyone worse off—but surveys and spending data at the time both suggested that this was not happening.

Where do we stand today?
  • Troubles associated with the production and distribution of physical goods have been fading rapidly at the same time that demand has normalized. End prices for consumers have not yet fallen that much, which suggests that there could be room for further disinflation ahead.
  • .....


First off, many pundits are now questioning why the Fed is over-tightening. The reason the Fed is over-tightening is because the jobs market remains inordinately strong due to the fact that low paid service workers are extremely scarce and in high demand. However, at the same time we are witnessing the beginning of a white collar recession centered in the Tech sector, which is what Michael Burry has been predicting for the past year.

Which means there is a severe mismatch in the jobs market: High demand/low supply for service workers. Low demand/high supply for Tech workers. These two labour markets are totally separate and yet they lead the Fed to the same conclusion - keep tightening. It's not as if Tech workers are going to take jobs at Chipotle. At least not yet. And if they do, the collapse in total consumption will be highly deflationary. Similar to what happened when laid off manufacturing workers took jobs at Home Depot. What we are witnessing is the last stage of the decimation of the middle class.



The release this morning of October Producer Price indices brings yet more evidence that the inflationary pressures sparked by multi-trillion dollar Covid "stimulus" checks in 2020 and 2021 peaked earlier this year, as I have been pointing out for months. Many factors have contributed to this: growth in the M2 money supply has been essentially zero since late last year; the stimulus checks have ceased; the dollar has been very strong; commodity prices have been very weak; and soaring interest rates have brought the housing market to its knees. All of these developments mean that the supply of money and the demand to hold it have come back to some semblance of balance, and that is of course essential if inflation is to return to a low and steady rate of, say, 2%.

This all but guarantees that the Fed soon will be scaling back on its tightening agenda. For my money, the FOMC's November 2 rate hike (from 3.25% to 4.0%) should be the last, but a hike next month of 50 bps (to 4.5%) is likely to be the Fed's last move for the foreseeable future. The Fed simply can't react as fast as the market does to changing realities—unfortunately, the Fed is usually "behind the curve." In any event, a 4.5% funds rate by year end is fully priced into the market and thus it should not be very impactful. What will change though is the market's expectation for where rates will be a year from now: lower than currently expected, and that is what is driving equity prices higher. .....

Inflation will be with us for some time to come, but its rate of increase will continue to moderate. This doesn't mean the Fed has to continue to tighten, however. Just maintaining its current stance would probably be sufficient to get inflation back down to 2%. That assumes, however, that M2 growth continues to be essentially flat and the government avoids sending out another massive batch of checks funded with the printing press. 








...... The CPI that is representative of inflation, the Fed’s No. 1 enemy, is still moving higher from an annual basis thanks to rising supply costs and companies still passing along upstream cost increases that occurred over the past two years.

Looking at the Producer Price Index (PPI), which is focused more on upstream production costs, that direction has already changed and has been slowing since June. Transportation costs are a portion of this figure. 

The point is that scarcity is diminishing. Supply chain congestion is easing. Consumer conditions have diminished from a purchasing power perspective. It takes time for this all to fully work its way into macroeconomic figures and behavior to change fully. 

The transportation sector has been on the front end of both the economic boom and its recent decline. ......






Tweet Thread:
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Bubble Fare:


The Minsky Moment:
"Over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance. Furthermore, if an economy with a sizeable body of speculative financial units is in an inflationary state, and the authorities attempt to exorcise inflation by monetary constraint, then speculative units will become Ponzi units and the net worth of previously Ponzi units will quickly evaporate. Consequently, units with cash flow shortfalls will be forced to try to make position by selling out position. This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values"



... Who could’ve known, just 12 months ago, that things would turn out this way for crypto? After all, the private money business sounded even more compelling this go-around than it has in the past.

I’m being sarcastic, of course. The private money business never works, and this time most assuredly wasn’t “different.”

In the wake of the FTX fiasco, much of the breathless crypto coverage emanating from the financial media (mainstream, alternative and otherwise), seems to intentionally avoid addressing the elephant in the room. If that’s the case, it’s understandable. Because to address it would be to concede that nearly everyone — from large media conglomerates to the most respected venture capitalists on the planet to storied hedge funds — was duped into believing that all it took to make the private money business viable was a single innovation. 

That’s plainly absurd. For one thing, some experts offer trenchant arguments against the idea that blockchain constitutes a “technology” at all, if technology is supposed to be synonymous with true innovation. Even if it is an innovation, many skeptics argue it’s not an especially useful one. In the interest of brevity, I won’t walk through those arguments, but you can certainly do so yourself if you have Google and half an hour to spare.

Beyond that, though, the notion of private money at scale, and, more to the point, the notion of private money at scale as an investable proposition, is stupid. Not “misguided,” not “misplaced” and not any other more generous adjective either. Just plain old stupid. ........

The cryptocurrency craze taught us that if enough people believe, the myth can become strong enough to supplant common sense, and the resultant mania can perpetuate the delirium such that skeptics begin to question themselves, on the way to becoming converts. On that level, crypto is really no different than the dollar or any other fiat money. It’s all just a myth, and once there are enough converts, holding out becomes asinine. But no crypto has come anywhere near that tipping point. And thanks to recent events, none ever will. ........



A simple crypto rule to live by: any token or exchange that has a CEO, identifiable individual or development team associated with it is not real crypto; it's the antithesis of crypto. 

This substack has been warning for quite some time that all of these centralized exchanges are nothing more than grifting operations, IRS reporting nodes and CIA black ops money laundering facilitators. 

I have been warning since around 2019 that Tether is the single most egregious crypto scam out there. It is far worse than FTX, with Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and his team of scammers having had direct ties with Tether. The sordid cadre of snake oil salesmen behind Tether makes SBF look like an ethical player. ....




2nd part of:

......... Now on to the casino...

Stories abound as to what caused the collapse of the FTX Ponzi scheme. Because what could go wrong? What these exchanges all have in common is that they issue their own proprietary Crypto currency which they use as the medium of exchange for all trades. The FTX coin (FTT) was one of the best performing cryptos of the past two years because FTX was laundering all client cash through their own currency in order to keep it artificially inflated. The other thing they were doing is what's called "burning Crypto", meaning destroying large amounts of their own currency float in order to keep it artificially scarce. Making it easier for speculators to manipulate it higher. Then they were taking this artificial wealth and they were squandering it on everything from penthouses and drugs to political bribes to ensure their scam stayed unregulated. 

And it worked great.  

But it was all doomed to collapse because the entire business model was not built upon creating value, it was predicated upon the greater fool theory. And so it was DOOMED to collapse. 


Tweet Vid:



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Advances in attribution science mean we can pin the blame for extreme weather on polluting nations, making the argument for climate reparations impossible to ignore



Yves here. One hates to be the voice of sobriety, but it is clear that there isn’t anything dimly approaching the necessary collective will to take on climate change. Unless you are able to go to a very low carbon footprint, which typically takes money (land, investment in some key infrastructure) and a sturdy back, you must participate i the current habitat-destroying economic system to put food on your family, as George Bush once put it. So it is no surprise that COP27 essentially whistled past the graveyard. ...



The world’s top climate scientists agree that fossil fuels are causing dangerous climate change. They say that, in order to keep warming to 1.5° Celsius—the point at which most places can still be saved—most of the world’s existing fossil fuel resources need to remain in the ground.

But the world as a whole seems to have missed the memo. On Sunday, the two-week COP27 climate summit in Egypt ended with a global agreement to keep warming to 1.5° Celsius—but without a global commitment to phase out, or even phase down, the use of fossil fuels.

The absence of such a commitment makes the COP27 deal nonsensical. Scientists have not found any path to achieve a 1.5°C target without significantly reducing the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

But climate pledges shaped by fossil fuel interests never make sense. And that’s exactly what the COP27 deal is. ...


... “I remain concerned at the number of outstanding issues, including on finance mitigation, adaptation, loss and damage, and their inter linkages,” Sameh Shoukry, an Egyptian diplomat serving as COP27 president, told delegates at the International Convention Center.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) Scotland head of campaigns Mary Church said in a statement that “as we race towards climate breakdown, once again we are seeing rich countries trying to evade their responsibility to step up and do their fair share of climate action.”

“As extreme weather events wreak havoc around the world, the U.K. and U.S. are parroting the mantra of keeping 1.5°C alive while doing exactly the opposite by continuing to expand damaging fossil fuel projects,” she noted, referring to the more ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris agreement. “They are failing to stump up the climate finance they owe and which Global South countries need to adapt to and recover from the impacts of global heating.”

Meanwhile, Church continued, “big polluters who brought the climate to the brink of breakdown are cynically bargaining away the future of people and planet in order to eke out a few extra years of profits from business-as-usual, by pushing dangerous fantasy techno-fixes and human rights trashing nature-fixes.” ....



The COP27, in itself, wouldn't deserve a comment. It is over, and that's it -- been there, done that, and nobody cared. But I think it is a good occasion to reproduce this text by Stuart B. Hill that nicely explains why we make mistakes all the time when trying to manage complex systems. The COP27, indeed, has been a good example of the concept of "pulling the levers in the wrong direction" as Jay Forrester, the creator of System Dynamics, explained to us. .....



Sci Fare:

Investigations on Stress Perception and Psychological Well-Being—A Randomized Cross-Over Trial in Highly Sensitive Persons

“Both stays in the forest and in the field result in improved emotional well-being measured with a POMS questionnaire. CSP-14 total scores and especially feelings of security and vitality were better after staying in the forest compared to staying on a field. The intensity of these effects is probably modified by the season and the weather.”


Orbiters spy potential ongoing planetary “death spiral”


Albert Einstein’s ideas about space-time aren’t exactly intuitive, and they aren’t exactly Einstein’s, either.

The development of relativity is usually attributed to Albert Einstein, but he provided the capstone for a theoretical edifice that had been under construction since James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism into a single theory of electromagnetism in the 1860s. Maxwell’s theory explained what light is — an oscillating wave in electromagnetic fields — and seemed to attach a special significance to the speed at which light travels. The idea of a field existing all by itself wasn’t completely intuitive to scientists at the time, and it was natural to wonder what was actually “waving” in a light wave.

Various physicists investigated the possibility that light propagated through a medium they dubbed the luminiferous ether. But nobody could find evidence for any such ether, so they were forced to invent increasingly complicated reasons why this substance should be undetectable. Einstein’s contribution in 1905 was to point out that the ether had become completely unnecessary, and that we could better understand the laws of physics without it. All we had to do was accept a completely new conception of space and time......



Most of you surely know the fine-tuning argument for God: the claim that the physical constants of the Universe are such as to permit the evolution and existence of life (especially H. sapiens), and the concatention of so many salubrious constants is improbable—too coincidental to reflect anything but a Great Designer. (Its proponents claim that any alteration in these constants would make life impossible.)

This hourlong video interviews proponents and opponents of this argument for God (mostly opponents). They include philosophers, physicists, and believers. ...

Nearly all the people interviewed reject the argument, largely on the grounds that we simply cannot calculate a priori what the probabilities are of the constants of nature being what they are, and there are alternative explanations for life that are purely naturalistic. ....



Other Fare:

Neuroimaging study reveals significant brain changes in areas associated with language comprehension, cognition, and circadian rhythm control six months after COVID-19 infection.




The Ancestral Puebloans were driven from their homes in the American Southwest by a combination of factors rather than a single cause.

Cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloans—the Anasazi to the Navajo Diné—haunt the desert Southwest. Mesa Verde, Chaco, Canyon de Chelly, and many other  sites and artifacts in the Four Corners region stand testament to six centuries of residency. However, they tell us little of the people that came and then went, leaving buildings, pottery, and bones behind. There have been more than 4,000 habitation sites detected in the Mesa Verde region of southwestern Colorado. Population estimates for this area alone in the mid-1200s CE run up to 19,200 people.

Yet these people abandoned the houses and villages more than two hundred years before the first Europeans arrived in the region. ....


An evidence informed, peer-to-peer, skill-building program designed by and for career and volunteer fire fighters across Canada.


With more and more teams being understaffed, chances are you’ve been asked to take on more work. Top performers are a prime target for additional requests. But you need to be careful about what you agree to take on. In this piece, the author outlines when it’s best to say no to taking on more work: 1) When your primary job responsibilities will suffer. 2) When it’s someone else’s work. 3) When there’s no clear exit strategy. 4) When the ask is unreasonable.



Vid 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:


It should be considered an embarrassment for the states and districts involved, but the 2022 midterm elections are still being counted as I write this. In some cases, ballot drop boxes, mail-in ballots and “malfunctioning” voting machines have created a suspicious fog of uncertainty, and the uncertainty always seems to work in the favor of the political left.

Needless to say, some kind of change needs to happen – The majority of Americans are aware that ongoing trends of national deconstruction cannot be allowed to continue. Even the people that refrain from voting are watching the elections, just to see if the momentum of the country has shifted even a little. And, many people who tend to refrain are on the independent/libertarian side of things.

Times change and circumstances evolve, even if some people are too bitter or jaded to see it. The old guard Neocons trained in the Chicago school by Leo Strauss along with the acolytes of Irving Kristol are losing favor among conservative voters and many are dying out. The era of Bush family politics is going extinct; they were never conservative anyway.

What is left behind is a kind of philosophical stew – A mixture of libertarians, independents, Republicans and patriots that don’t necessarily affiliate with every aspect of the GOP but they will vote for a candidate with a strong stance against the woke propaganda and globalism of the political left. That’s what they are looking for. ....



.... It’s fitting that the last straw on this beast’s back was the phoniest scam of all, and saturated with every known sort of millennial Woke posturing: the FTX swindle. Its avatar, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), proved to be a special species of villain, the idiot-savant slob, clever enough to somehow winkle a physics degree out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but not very good with the basic math of money — for instance, the equation that margin must equal collateral — and really really bad at covering his oafish tracks.

In the dramatic demise of FTX, the self-styled crypto-currency-exchange, all the nefarious connections between the great ills of our time stand out starkly in a sudden, glaring light, namely: the dubious Covid-19 pandemic and all the punitive measures cooked up by officialdom, with help from FTX’s money, to supposedly combat the virus, especially the deadly mRNA “vaccines” still being pushed on a credulous public; the sinister operations of so-called hedge funds and their role in magically levitating the financial markets of an economy foundering on necrotizing malinvestments and debt that can never be paid; and the Satanic endeavors of a political faction, the Democratic Party of Chaos, in subverting every institution from sea to shining sea from schools, to courts, to elections while shoving the US into a land war in Europe. ....

......  This will all occur against the background of the now-unraveled Covid-19 story. By early 2023 the evidence of excess all-causes deaths and disabilities resulting from Pfizer and Moderna shots will be overwhelming and the nation will know it got played by a scheme between the corrupt public health authorities, the pharma companies, and the corporate medical establishment, including its discredited journals. Nobody in America will ever trust a doctor again. .....





Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


How often do you think of schizophrenia? Are you aware that most of Western society suffers from collective schizophrenia? I've mentioned wetiko in this space often, because of the implications it has with modern civilization. For those unfamiliar with wetiko, please see this article. Most people completely ignore the unsustainability of civilization, brought about by denial of reality. It is this collective denial which also allows us to completely ignore the real world that we live in; especially the part which actually sustains us - the flora and fauna which provide the wonderful biodiversity that promulgates the ecosystem services we require to survive - our habitat. Without said habitat, we cannot continue as a species. ......

.... I've written about wetiko before because of the power it wields in terms of what society does collectively. The reason for so much of the ecological overshoot our species has caused is due to the cultural programming and indoctrination caused by the ignorance of the unsustainability of civilization and the inability to see the whole forest through the trees, so to speak. Most people today are just becoming aware of the true threat of climate change but are completely ignoring all the other symptom predicaments of overshoot, such as energy and resource decline or pollution loading or biodiversity decline, and as such, have little recognition of precisely WHY we are at risk of near-term extinction. We are systematically wiping out the very habitat we require as organisms, and not just through climate change or any other symptom predicament, but through ALL the symptom predicaments that ecological overshoot is causing (caused by us collectively). .....



What a nightmare. Elon, the newly elected president of USA, was… No, not that nightmare. The other one. Ah yes. Ok, here it goes.

People were on the streets celebrating the launch of a global price on tonne of emitted CO2. Oil and gas companies were informing their shareholders about the reserves that will stay in the ground. The financial industry was assessing the real cost of business based on the new global price of CO2 emissions which was rapidly shifting flows of investments. Overnight, valuations and stock prices were adjusted to reflect the real potential and the real risk. News outlets, social media channels flooded by updates on how things, this time, certainly will change. Corporate CEOs together with government officials around the world were launching cooperative programs to enable a just transition for millions of workers affected by the sudden shift. The air was thinner, brighter, crispier. NGOs around the world began collaborating on global and regional reconciliation commissions between the corporate and public sector to protect Mother Earth. A new dawn of humanity.

I woke up. Feverish, bathed in sweat in a dark room, gasping for air. After a couple of minutes in the dark, eyes adjusted, I could see a dot of light right under the door. I stepped outside, hesitatingly. I walked over the floor to reach my phone, almost scared. In that short moment between the door and phone my mind processed selectively. That fearful feeling of discovery. Opening my phone, looking at the stream of news, updates and messages. Nothing. Even worse than nothing. Nothing multiplied with less. I sat down on the chair looking out in the dark Nordic November morning. An unpleasant, cold, raw morning, feeling utterly stupid.

Engineered failure. Man-made. Not one of the 40 markers of climate action are on track to meet the targets that governments have agreed. In the first nine months of this year, the seven biggest private sector oil companies made around $150bn in profits. Yet governments continue to supplement this loot by granting oil and gas companies $64bn a year in public subsidies.

There are no longer any feasible means of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating if new oil and gas fields are developed. Yet fossil fuel companies, with the encouragement of the governments that either own or license them, are planning a major investment surge between 2023 and 2025. The biggest planned expansions, by a long way, are in the US. The soft facts – the vague and unsecured promises at Sharm el-Sheikh about curbing consumption – count for nothing against the hard facts of extending production.

The rich world’s governments arrived at the conference in Egypt saying “it’s now or never”. They left saying “how about never?” For how much longer will we sit and watch while our governments throw it all away? Yeah, this sounds so activist-like, almost arousing. Doomsday-like. It is all good, we got this. Step by step. Rome was not built in one day, or declined in one year. But people in the Rome never realised it was declining…

Now, for the sake of sanity and realism, we need to look at the science, I guess? Or is science also a “matter of view”? .......



At every COP, there are naysayers who decry the waste of time while our planet burns, the private jets ferrying VIPs to and fro, the human rights record of the host, and the sheer folly of it all. To which I invariably ask, what alternative do they propose to the United Nations’ tireless attempts to harmonize the divergent views and political histories of more than 200 sovereigns without whose consensus there can be no globally cohesive and effective solution to our common dilemma? And because both government budgets and philanthropy are inadequate to the trillion-dollar challenge we face, what alternative do they propose to inviting the largest businesses on the planet into the tent and engaging them in the financial discussions?
I am still waiting for the answer.

In Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, Vlad and Xi were no shows, and Biden’s tottering, commitment-backtracking speech got a standing O. After the usual round of vaporous promises and self-congratulatory toasts, the 27th Conference of Parties to the Paris Agreement concluded. It could have been meaningless had not they buried the lead, which came on Day Two and merited only a single paragraph summary somewhere deep in the coverage by The Guardian, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the rest. They missed the big story.

You, dear readers, are more fortunate.

This week I had one of those special moments like in an action movie where time slows down and the hero can chart a course through a maze of bad guys, oncoming traffic, or a roaring conflagration. I suddenly — or not so suddenly, as it took a few days to gel in my brain — saw a new route through the climate emergency that functions at the scale of nations and bank-financed industrial civilization more generally.

On a routine basis, I hold the contradiction that humanity is in its final generations and there is no way we can escape our fate, and secondly, that somehow, steps if taken now could pull us back from that brink. Nonetheless, given a bailing bucket in a sinking lifeboat, I would choose to diligently bail even if the water was coming in faster than I could throw it out, because (a) it buys a little more time; and (b) a faint glimmer of hope is better than no hope at all. If you decide not to act, only then does the outcome become certain.

The glimmer of hope that pierced my brain was the idea that the António Guterres Greenwash Report might open a portal to a different paradigm; to a regulated regime of ESG audits that would transform everything.

I know. It’s geeky. Let me break that down. .......

Fast on the heels of this seemingly innocent exercise in transparency — who does not enjoy ridiculing greenwashing? — is the prospect of a massive new agency for change. Rather than brokering between nations with millennia-old axes to grind and voter emotions roiled by state cyber actors using clever phone apps and billion-dollar disinformation algorithms, the UN went straight to the real source of power, with trillions, not mere billions, of casino chips on the table. Beyond its own UN agencies — UNDP, GEF, IMF and World Bank Group — the real whales are JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Securities, Citigroup, UBS, Credit Suisse, HSBC, BNP Paribas, and Deutsche Bank, to name a few. There are also sovereign banks like Bank of China (BOC, BOCOM, CITIC, and CCB), multilateral development banks such as European Investment Bank (EIB), Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) and Asian Development Bank (ADB), and regional development banks like Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. ........



In 2022, a four-year assessment convened by the United Nations came to a straightforward conclusion: society’s market-based focus on short-term profits and economic growth has contributed greatly to the crises we are facing within the natural environment, notably climate change, species extinction, ocean plastic waste, and other systemic problems. 

On the face of it, this conclusion might come as little surprise. Of course valuing profit over environmental preservation is contributing to a series of ecological challenges that mark what scientists are calling the Anthropocene, an era in which of Earth’s systems are profoundly influenced by humans. But the U.N.’s conclusion is more profound than it seems. Even if we understand why we are facing these environmental crises, changing this reality is not a small affair.

To help us understand why this insight is so important, we turned, in a recent paper published in Behavioral Science and Policy, to institutional theory, a branch of research that studies the rules, norms, and ultimately beliefs and values of our culture, all of which guide our behavior and actions. It is at this deepest level—what we value and what we believe—that must be at the root of any effort to address the challenge that the U.N. report calls out.

In particular, two sets of value systems that underlie Western society trigger environmental problems. The first is a faith in market capitalism. This faith embraces a free market, property ownership, shareholder rights, limited regulation, and unlimited economic growth to produce socially optimal outcomes such as economic prosperity or a clean environment. This value set leads us to believe in the “win-win” solution to all our problems; that we can, for example, correct climate change by pursuing solutions that also make us money.

The second is a faith in technological optimism. This optimism embraces human ingenuity and industrial innovation. This leads us to seek a new gadget that will make our problems go away; windmills, solar cells, or electric cars.

Both value systems trivialize our present environmental challenges, leading us to believe that we can find solutions that will allow us to continue our lifestyles unchanged. In short, we look for Band-Aid solutions that do not address the root problems within our culture. While important in the short term, the power of the market and technology alone will not save us in the long term. In the long term, we will have to change the way we think. .....



In writing about the unfolding climate crisis from a left wing perspective, much of my work revolves around untangling genocidal capitalist propaganda. Whether we’re talking about science denial, stalling tactics, or pushing climate nihilism to encourage surrender, most of this propaganda exists to obscure the reality that we can still stop the climate apocalypse, but only if we stop burning fossil fuels; which will effectively end capitalism. Given the stakes in this fight, and the sheer volume of that propaganda, it’s hard not to feel like the facts are being drowned out by malfeasant actors with infinite money to “flood the zone with bullshit.” In short, it feels like losing; and that’s terrifying when losing is simply not an option.

Of course, it doesn’t help that in a propaganda model media environment, reactionary capital also has the ability to influence our ideas about what the folks around us think about the climate crisis. Given that the same billionaires killing the planet for profit, also own the corporate media outlets reporting on the crisis, it’s not really in the mainstream media’s best interest to tell you the labor class is getting wise to their genocidal game. In today’s Recommended Reading then, let’s look at a couple of articles that prove the truth is still somehow reaching the masses on the subject of climate crisis solutions.

...................... Frankly my friends, I didn’t share these stories to give you a false sense of security. The truth is that we’re all under the gun and running out of time for useful fictions and lying sociopaths. What these stories do prove however is that sometimes by inches, and sometimes by miles, everyday people are starting to tune out capitalist propaganda about climate catastrophe, and speak truth to power about who is really responsible, and what is to be done. It’s not the solution, but it is a beginning, and it can provide weary resistors to the capitalist genocide in progress with something important; hope, a resource in short supply during this terrifying moment in human history. .....



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


Show this to your friends and family.

Yesterday, I came across a somber tweet by a man who’s trying to protect his family from Covid. He said, “my wife has been speaking with the principal of my children’s elementary school and that he has been advising her to file for divorce because I was clearly not well and ‘my life revolves around fear.’”

Yes, a principal is telling someone’s wife to divorce him because he wants to protect them from a deadly, disabling virus.

Companies are also starting to pressure their employees to get therapy “to conquer their fear of Covid.”

There’s a line from the film The Big Short that echoes through my head these days. The investor Michael Burry says, “I may have been early, but I’m not wrong.” There’s a lot of us who feel like that right now. A majority of the world thinks we’re crazy. In reality, we’re not crazy at all.

We have the facts.

Over the last few months, there’s been an avalanche of studies telling us that Covid poses a major threat to our health, our lives, and our sanity. The biggest risk now comes in the weeks and months after we recover. Our politicians and media have done a poor job communicating this threat. Instead, they’re doing their best to manipulate information to protect their own political interests. The public has bought into these lies. They want to believe they can return to normal.

The latest studies tell us that’s not possible. .......



The babyboomers panicked in march 2020, because they began to suspect they would finally receive the cosmic retribution they believe they deserve, so they locked everyone up at home until SCIENCE! would save the day. This wasn’t done for the nursing home residents, it was done for obese boomers who didn’t want to end up in the ICU.

All the smart people realized a bad vaccine against SARS-COV-2 would merely make things worse, but four companies went ahead and poisoned the Western population. The result we got of course, was escalating vaccine-enhanced herd susceptibility, as illustrated here: ...

Without vaccines, we would have had herd immunity. With a vaccinated population, we ended up in the current situation where people get infected about twice a year, because the herd isn’t building up the sort of durable immunity against this lung-damaging brain-damaging lymphocyte depleting virus that brings r0 below 1. The boosted boomers are walking biohazards.

So here is what you get as a result:

We have seven times the normal number of kids under 6 months hospitalized with RSV, with hospitals begging Biden to declare an emergency, along with flu hospitalizations at a decade high. This is not just immunity debt, you don’t end up with seven times the normal number of hospitalizations like that.

You can also see from Denmark, which already had a massive RSV wave last year and now has another massive RSV wave, that this can’t be down to just the lockdowns preventing people from getting it. There is simply increased susceptibility to severe outcome: ...

How do you think this happens? Hint: People are getting infected twice a year now with a lung-damaging lymphocyte damaging/depleting SARS corona virus. The reason people are getting infected twice a year now, is because your politicians’ only goal was to prevent their electorate of obese solipsistic boomers from facing the consequences of their own actions, rather than asking what is good for the population as a whole.

You bought yourself a summer in 2021 with empty hospitals, but you disrupted the natural mechanisms that lead to population-wide sterilizing immunity against rapidly mutating respiratory pathogens of this nature.

And we’re now paying the price.

........... Why do you have droves of kids in the hospital with RSV now, simultaneously with an unseasonal influenza outbreak reaching a height not seen in years?

This is like climate change, in that you have a long list of positive feedback loops served on your platter, without any significant negative feedback loops to bail you out:

-IgG3-> IgG4 from constant boosting.

-OAS from repeat exposure to Wuhan spike.

-ADE.

-Hematopoietic progenitor cell damage from Wuhan spike exposure (ie direct vaccine induced immune toxicity).

-T cell damage from constant reinfection.

-Increasing viral biomass from ongoing evolution.

-Increasing viral biomass from ongoing immune depletion.

-Accelerating rate of evolution, from increasing viral biomass.

I would love to hear: What’s the negative feedback loop that’s supposed to save the day?

The now fringe Zero COVID academics have exactly one: Accept that you’re now unable to breathe the air. That’s their proposed solution, to accept that the air is now poisonous and the human body can no longer withstand exposure to the wide variety of respiratory viruses we’re continually exposed to, a kind of final alienation of human consciousness from nature.

But I have to say this: If you signed up to receive these vaccines, you are to some degree complicit in what is now happening to the infants. Actions have consequences, just as I am complicit in damaging the atmosphere for having worked at a Bitcoin company. And you might say to yourself: “I wouldn’t be able to go to my shitjob/shitcollege.” But that is the thing with existential threats: Averting them requires paying a costly price, in my case it means I had to ditch a comfortable lazy job where I could roll out of bed at 10AM in the morning and work from my laptop.

It would be easy to blame the government, if it wasn’t for the simple fact that most of the moronic cowardly self-absorbed Western public readily signed up for these genetic and immunological experiments. They didn’t exactly have to force most of you by gunpoint, the few people who were a little hesitant would hear “you can’t show up to your existentially empty meaningless cubicle shitjob anymore if you don’t roll up your sleeve” and it was enough for most morons to sign up for this crap.

Thanks again.



..................... It’s worth asking yourself this: We have a bunch of young women now who have been exposed to three shots of these vaccines, stuck with an IgG dominated antibody response that is cross-reactive with a bunch of human antigens. These antibodies can pass through the placenta, which the IgM antibodies your body would normally deploy can’t do. What will happen to their children? My expectation is that these women will give birth to children with autism and other disorders associated with brain inflammation at a higher rate than before, among other problems. ......

I just can’t emphasize this enough: These midwits fooled the human immune system into deploying the wrong tool for the job, by inducing a first exposure to the Spike protein in a place where the IgM antibodies can’t reach. When you study nature very closely, you’re supposed to develop great respect for its minute details. When you fail to have such respect, then you start causing trouble.


********** Radagast: Positive feedback is a bitch

I’ve explained a few times now that when you get constant waves of widespread SARS-COV-2 infection in the population, bad things start happening. Namely, you start getting positive feedback effects: The damage incurred from infection makes your body susceptible to further infection, both from SARS-COV-2 and other pathogens (RSV, Influenza etc). .........

It was only through human stupidity, that this SARS-COV-2 virus managed to spread so far and has now managed to enter the snowball effect of constant reinfections. The corona virus now decimating our population needed a massive helping hand from our own species. Your experts accomplished that through their social distancing experiment in early 2020 (wiping out our domesticated friends who induce cross-reactive immunity that pushes r0 below 1), along with their mass vaccination project. The question is: Are they idiots, or evil? I have no proper answer to that. ............

The cause of our ongoing crisis has to be sought mainly in the mass vaccination campaign, which was the most important factor in tipping over our population towards repeated immune depleting reinfections. As an example, here is yet another study that recently came out, that found increased risk of reinfection with three shots versus two shots: ..........

Please understand: This was hypothetical back when I told you about it a year ago. But now you’re living in a brave new world, where it has come to fruition and where the evidence is openly available.

You can not justify any interventions on the basis of reducing the number of people on a ventilator in a hospital in a particular season. Rather, every intervention also needs to be observed through the lens of the evolutionary arms race between primates and corona viruses that has been going on for millions of years. Putting a synthetic furin cleavage site in a novel SARS corona virus was a massive unprecedented own goal by our team, the mass vaccination campaign is a second own goal that makes our chances of winning increasingly dim. Widespread use of Molnupiravir looks like it could become the third own goal. .......


And how our nonsensical health policies continued anyway

On November 4, 2021, the Biden administration announced vaccine requirements for businesses with 100 or more employees and health care workers.
In March 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said “vaccinated people do not carry the virus,” and in May 2021, Anthony Fauci said that vaccinated people “become a dead end to the virus.”

But as 2021 went on, it became increasingly clear that the COVID-19 vaccines were not very efficacious at preventing infection, and vaccinated people could still transmit the virus. Despite this, governments around the world enacted draconian measures to coerce people into getting vaccinated.

This article will present a timeline of how vaccine efficacy against infection or high viral load (virus levels in the nose) waned over time, and how our health policies reacted, or failed to react, to changing information.

Consider this a record of how things went down during a particularly confusing time ...


On The Revelations of Pandemic Data

The following interview with Norman Fenton by David Marks presents a comprehensive overview of how pandemic data was skewed to serve the interests of Big Pharma and Government agendas.





CO-VIDs of the Week:




Revisionist Fare:




Pushback Fare:


This Wednesday, November 23, 2022 at 9:00 am (Eastern Standard Time), there will be a tribunal hearing in the case of Drs. Phillips, Trozzi, and Luchkiw. In my expert opinion, the overwhelming weight of the peer-reviewed scientific literature shows that these are doctors that had incredible foresight and courage at a time when their views were considered unpopular by less critically thinking physicians. Their abilities to practice medicine have been restricted by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. Personally, I am keen to observe if this will be a COVID-19-related legal decision that is made based on the weight of the scientific evidence. If so, it will be a conspicuously rare occurrence in Canada where COVID-19-related legal decisions have been made based on anything but the evidence. In this country, legal proceedings can be overseen by the public. If you are interested to see how one of the colleges of physicians and surgeons in Canada is approaching these types of cases, you can watch at this link ... 



COVID Corporatocracy Fare:





Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

War Fare:




Bill Clinton’s wholesale rejection of his predecessor’s Russia policy laid the groundwork for the current crisis between Russia and the West.

Understanding the history behind US policy toward Russia since the end of the Cold War has taken on renewed urgency in light of current events. As of this writing, the war in Ukraine, begun on February 24, 2022 has taken the lives of tens of thousands of people and has displaced million others in the largest wave of refugees on the European continent since the end of the Second World War. An understanding of how we arrived at this perilous moment takes on an even greater urgency in light of the real, if distant, possibility of nuclear war. International relations experts, including the realist scholar John J. Mearsheimer and the former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock (1987-1991) agree that today’s crisis surpasses the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in its potential to bring the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.  

A review of American policy towards Russia in the immediate post-Soviet decade of the 1990s suggests that things didn’t have to be this way: Specific American policy choices (made with the acquiescence of America’s NATO allies in Europe) pursued over the course of that decade have led us to where we are today.

What we will find is that American policy wasn’t always marked by the hubris that later became its hallmark. In the years following the end of the Cold War (which Matlock has convincingly argued Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev ended in his address on December 7, 1988 before the UN General Assembly) the US had an opportunity to pursue a policy towards Russia that was both magnanimous and prudential. ....





... Kiev’s refusal to negotiate a settlement that addresses Russia’s core security concerns, has left Russian president Vladimir Putin with no other option but to defeat Ukrainian forces on the battlefield and impose a settlement through force-of-arms. The impending winter offensive is designed to deliver the knock-out punch Russia needs to achieve its strategic objectives and bring the war to swift end. ......... 





Other Geopolitical Fare:


We have arrived at the 59th anniversary of the murder of America’s 35th President John F. Kennedy and too few have come to terms with the tragic forces that both murdered this great leader on November 22, 1963, and attempted to destroy the positive vision of mankind towards which Kennedy dedicated his life.

... In this presentation recorded in November 2013, I outlined the historical forces shaping the world when JFK become President in 1961, what this young man’s vision was for a post-colonial world of win-win cooperation, how he fought to shut down the Federal Reserve, break up the CIA, and end the Vietnam war. In this lecture, I also take on the cover up of JFK’s murder and how an Anglo-American intelligence operation coordinated through Montreal carried out the murder, how New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison fought to reveal the truth throughout the last 3 decades of his life and how the current alliance of Russia and China are offering humanity a 2nd chance to pick up the torch where it was dropped by JFK in 1963.

The full truth of this operation which mis-shaped the course of world history will surprise you. ....



Why President Kennedy was publicly murdered by the CIA fifty-nine years ago has never been more important, not because there is another political leader of his courage and stature whose life is now threatened by the same forces, but because there is not.  The Cold War and nuclear threat that he worked so hard to end have today been inflamed to a fever pitch by U.S. leaders in thrall to the forces that killed the president. President Joseph Biden is Kennedy’s opposite, an unrepentant war-monger, not only in Ukraine with the U.S. war against Russia and the U.S. nuclear first-strike policy, but throughout the world – the Middle-East, Africa, Syria, Iran, and on and on, including the push for war with China.  The Biden administration is doing all in its power to undo the legacy of JFK’s last year in office when on every front he fought for peace, not war.  It is not hard to realize that all presidents since John Kennedy have been fully aware that a bullet in the head in broad daylight could be their fate if they bucked their bosses.  They knew this when they sought the office because they were run by the same bosses before election.  Small-souled men, cowards on the make, willing to sacrifice millions to their ambition.

I believe that the following article, which I published a year ago, is worth reading again if you have once done so, and even more important if you have never read it. It is not based on speculation but on well-sourced facts, and it will make clear the importance of President Kennedy and why his assassination lay the foundation for today’s dire events.  In this dark time, when the world is spinning out of control, the story of his great courage in the face of an assassination he expected, can inspire us to oppose the systemic forces of evil that control the United States and are leading the world into the abyss. ......



Orwellian Fare:


... The result scares the BeJeezus out of me, not because the Orange God Emperor is back, but because nearly half of the vote was for censorship and the suppression of free speech.

.... People, according to Thierry Breton, will “no longer be able to say rubbish”. What he means, of course, is that people will only be able to say EU-approved rubbish. All other, non-approved, rubbish will be trashed.

... It’s a very dangerous path we’re heading down at the moment and nearly 50% of the Twitter population seem to be oblivious to the dangers.

But, of course, the next generation are being taught and manipulated to believe that free speech is harmful and dangerous and that merely hearing about free speech on a campus, at a “free speech event”, might be so traumatic that post-event counselling is required. ....





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


.... In recent days Twitter has reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump, Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, Project Veritas, Kathy Griffin, and the Babylon Bee. This to date is as close as Musk has come to honoring his stated intention of making Twitter a haven of free speech where people have a “digital town square” to debate and discuss ideas.

And it’s not enough. Un-banning a few famous people will drum up a lot of headlines and online chatter and make it look like you’re really doing something, but in the end all you’ve done is reinstate a handful of Twitter accounts. You haven’t done anything to meaningfully scale back the speech restrictions on your platform.

I can already hear the Elon simps falling all over themselves in a mad rush to tell me it’s only been a few weeks and I need to give Daddy more time, but they can go lick a Tesla battery. Nobody gains anything by giving the billionaire the benefit of the doubt and refraining from pointing out that he hasn’t done nearly enough at this point. The time to start criticizing and pushing is right now. 

Twitter is currently full of discussions about which famous people Musk should un-ban next, but they’re completely missing the point. Reinstating a handful of celebrities has no meaningful effect on the free expression of normal people.

I don’t care that I can see tweets from Trump and Kanye again; I care that people are still banned from the platform for questioning western allegations of Russian war crimes and voicing unauthorized opinions about the war in Ukraine. I care that people are still banned for questioning vaccines and Covid policies which affect everyone. I care that media from governments the US doesn’t like are censored and suppressed while its reporters are made to carry “state-affiliated media” labels that media personnel from US-aligned states don’t have. I care that mass purges of accounts are virtually always directed at people from US-targeted nations.

Free speech is important first and foremost not because it feels nice to be able to say whatever you want, but because being able to freely criticize the powerful puts an important check on power. ...

And that’s pretty much what you’d expect from a billionaire Pentagon contractor who is inextricably interwoven with the US military-industrial complex. People don’t get to be billionaires unless they collaborate with existing power structures, and they certainly never get anywhere close to managing critical narrative control infrastructure unless they are devoutly loyal to the empire.

Billionaires only come to the rescue in movies and comic books. Elon Musk is no more likely to save the day than Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne. People only believe he’s a hero because Hollywood has trained us to look for heroes, but Hollywood only does that to keep us searching for heroes outside ourselves. ...



❖

Nobody likes feeling like they’re part of the problem. The reality that the US is the most tyrannical, murderous and belligerent government on earth causes people discomfort for the same reason they don’t like thinking about factory farming or their own socioeconomic privilege.

❖

Western politicians, pundits and celebrities circulating the false claim that Iran sentenced 15,000 protesters to death is a good example of the way fact checking and journalistic responsibility go out the window when it’s a claim about a government the US empire wants to remove. It’s also a good illustration of the point Glenn Greenwald is always repeating that the largest and most egregious purveyors of misinformation in the western world are not Russian trolls or conspiracy theorists but the mainstream western political/media class.



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




With schools teaching sex and gender ideology beginning in kindergarten, the Biden administration encouraging early medical treatments for gender dysphoria, and social media influencers discussing the topic, a record number of adolescent girls believe they are transgender and are transitioning to live as males.

Concerned adults are sounding the alarm on the lack of scientific studies to support transgender medical treatments that permanently alter a young person’s physiology and leave their mental health issues unresolved.

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, who has been a mental health professional for 40 years, said the gender industry is built on the lies of one troubled psychologist.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


One of the defining characteristics of our era is that we believe we are free thinkers, and that we are good at making choices, but we’re wrong.

Our education system, as anyone who had gone thru it knows, is about sitting down, not talking unless given permission, and giving teacher the answer they want the way they want it. Our adult lives are about giving the boss what they want, the way they want it. This is how we spend most of our time from about age five.

In our lives outside of work we make choices from menus. We don’t create almost anything ourselves: the possibilities are predetermined. Even if we help create something that is on one of the menus, we usually work on a small part of it at best. Our society creates, but as individuals almost none of us create anything, and almost never anything important.

In our political lives we again choose from a menu. “This politician or that politician.” Even if we are primary voters, few of us choose the politicians who we get to choose from among the primary possibilities and if we somehow elect a maverick, they are soon defanged.

Our actual lives are about doing what we are told, and choosing from a list of choices created by other people.

We’re followers. Unimaginative followers. It’s not our fault, they got us when we were children and spent the rest of our lives conditioning us. Heck, they condition us, then get us to condition others. Those who are conditioned best become the next group in authority, and condition the next generation ...

The problem with all this should be obvious: when change is required, people who have been conditioned to choose for a menu created other people and who spend their entire lives doing what they’re told in the way they’re told to please boss/teacher (or else live a miserable life, since boss and teacher control access to the good life) are not suited to create new choices, or even to choose something radical, something that isn’t on the usual menus they’ve been seeing all their live.

The consequence is that for people to take action, en masse, we have to reach the point where it’s obvious, to paraphrase Lenin, that none of the choices on offer are safe any more and that doing something radical is necessary.

But since all we’ve been trained for is choosing off menus, we often choose stupidly. We Brexit under a Conservative like Boris Johnson. We elect a Trump. We keep selecting from whatever’s on the menu, and our only criterion is “this feels like radical change”. Often it isn’t, and if it is it’s worse than the usual menu. ...





Other Quotes of the Week:

deBoer: It’s well-established that I’m not a fan of the United States. I’m sure the comments are going to fill up here to tell me why I’m wrong, but I’m steadfast in this. Our history in the world, the history of the CIA and the defense department and the whole apparatus, is written in blood. Hell, what we did in Albania is probably not among the top 25 worst things we’ve ever done, and we were trying like hell to put people who sent Jews to Auschwitz in power. Read Legacy of Ashes if you have any remaining sense that the United States has been a benign force in the world.

Kunstler:  It really doesn’t matter how much more money we pound down that rat-hole, you understand, because by the time various parties — the weapons-makers, Volodymyr Zelensky, sundry members of the US House of Representatives, the Biden family, the World Economic Forum — are finished creaming off their fair shares, poor Ukraine won’t have enough cash-on-hand to replace six fuse-boxes in Zaporizhzhia.



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