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Saturday, November 25, 2023

2023-11-25

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Declining response rates to official surveys raise the possibility that government and central bank officials have been making decisions based on flawed data.


********** Hussman: Soft Selling a Hard Landing

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Emerging risk of a U.S. recession
I’ve often noted that in every noise-reduction problem, uniformity matters. There is vastly more information in the common signal drawn from multiple sensors than there is in any single measure by itself. While we still don’t have enough data to anticipate a recession with high confidence, my view is that the sudden enthusiasm about a “soft landing” runs exactly opposite to the trend of the data. ......

It’s useful to recognize that the definition of a recession as “two quarters of negative GDP” is a rule-of-thumb, not the actual method by which recessions are dated. Remember, in every noise-reduction problem, uniformity matters. For the NBER, dating a recession is based on the depth, diffusion and duration of retreat across several measures of economic activity: mainly output, income, sales, and employment. ......


..... The difficulty here is that employment is among the most lagging of economic indicators. To obtain a sensitive measure of recession risk from employment-based measures, we have to go back to the idea of drawing information from “uniformity.” For employment, the best measures are those that capture subtle shifts in the labor activity: reduced demand for temporary help, increases in initial and continuing jobless claims, changes in the composition of the employed (for example, part-time “for economic reasons” because full-time work is unavailable), changes in the duration of unemployment, and declines in aggregate hours worked. ...


........ It’s true that valuations have strong implications for long-term, full-cycle market outcomes, but it’s incorrect to view those outcomes as short-term forecasts. Instead, they provide context about where investors stand within the market cycle. Based on prevailing market valuations, we estimate that poor total returns are likely for the S&P 500 in the coming 10-12 years, that equity market returns, relative to bonds, are likely to be among the worst in history, and that a market loss on the order of -63% over the completion of this cycle would be consistent with prevailing valuations and a century of market history. A few quick charts on these long-term, full-cycle risks. ...........


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… Some economists are already taking a victory lap because they didn’t forecast a recession and a recession hasn’t started yet. But we think they’re declaring victory too early. Some of them say that we never should have been worried about a recession while inflation fell because the surge in inflation was due to supply-chain issues, and then the reduction in inflation has been due to fixing those issues.

The problem with their theory is that they ignore the link between the surge in the money supply in 2020-21 and the inflation that followed, as well as the drop in money and the reduction in inflation this year. They think it’s a coincidence, but we think they’re going to get a rude awakening in the year ahead.


Credit-card utilization and delinquency rates are on the rise


We’re seeing too many trucks for too little freight



N-n-n-n-nineteen
Just in time to arrest the growing optimism that a recession has been canceled and not merely postponed, the Leading Economic Indicators extended their losing streak to 19 months. The LEI, which are administered by the Conference Board, smoosh together 10 measures that indicate the strength of the economy, ranging from jobless claims through the stock market to the bond market yield curve. Over time, it’s been one of the most reliable recession indicators there is. ........

..... Belief in a “Goldilocks” outcome is growing. For those who make arguments like this about the lack of precedents for an outcome, there is always the response that the pandemic created conditions unlike anything previously seen in the modern economy.

That said, the guideposts that worked in the past suggest that the plane is in for a bumpy landing.



................ We will get a business-cycle recession eventually because there always is a business-cycle recession eventually because it’s part of the business cycle. The question is when.

Why predictive models that used to work well are failing spectacularly with their recession predictions in this crazy economy will be the topic of a future brainstorming article here when I can wrap my brains halfway around it.



..... Economic data releases remain mixed, but overall, the US economy is holding up better than anticipated at the beginning of this year.

Consequently, market participants have embraced the central banks' rhetoric as accurate and anticipate that interest rates will remain elevated for an extended period. Market participants expect only gradual rate decreases from the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank in the second half of next year.

........ It seems that market participants may be underestimating the potential deterioration of the economic situation in the Eurozone.

... My perspective remains that the US is nearing a recession and probably will enter one in the current quarter. Empirical data supports the idea that the US yield curve is a reliable recession indicator.

... So far, the data sends mixed signals, leading market participants to interpret things positively for financial markets. This interpretation is driven by the assumption that the Fed has concluded its interest rate hikes. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the prevailing consensus suggests a gradual economic slowdown in the coming year, though nothing overly severe. This could imply that the stock market will likely continue to perform well or, to put it differently, may still experience further gains. It's essential to note that when the stock market struggles to ascend and becomes range-bound, that signals a time to adopt a more defensive stance, even though sentiment has recently become somewhat stretched.


Ed Rooney: Are you also aware, Mrs. Bueller, that Ferris does not have what we consider to be an exemplary attendance record?

Katie Bueller: I don't understand.

Ed Rooney: He has missed an unacceptable number of school days. In the opinion of this educator, Ferris is not taking his academic growth seriously. Now I've spent my morning examining his records. If Ferris thinks that he can just coast through this month and still graduate, he is sorely mistaken. I have no reservations whatsoever about holding him back another year.

Katie Bueller: This is all news to me.

Ed Rooney: It usually is. So far this semester he has been absent nine times.

Katie Bueller: Nine times?

Ed Rooney: Nine times.

Katie Bueller: I don't remember him being sick nine times.

Ed Rooney: That's probably because he wasn't sick. He was skipping school. Wake up and smell the coffee, Mrs. Bueller. It's a fool's paradise. He is just leading you down the primrose path.

Katie Bueller: I can't believe it.

Ed Rooney: I've got it right here in front of me. He has missed nine days...
What happened next in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was priceless, as Mr. Rooney watched Ferris’s absences fall from nine to two on his computer screen. If only the real world operated as flawlessly.

A different kind of ‘nine’ came into focus as we dissected last Friday’s October state jobs data via the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Around a month ago, with a numerator of 42 and denominator of 51 (including Washington D.C.), we noted that 82% of states had rising month-over-month (MoM) unemployment rates in September. One more month of data in hand and we now tally 50 states with rising unemployment rates MoM, or 98%.

The pandemic aside, since the state unemployment series’ 1976 inception, there have been nine other such instances -- eight of them were during the recessions of 1980, 1981-82, 2001 and 2007-09, while the ninth occurred two months afterthe 2001 recession (top left table).

In theory, we call the Feather a day right here and now. In practice, 2023 has rewritten the rule book. We’ve lost count of the missives we’ve written citing not leading indicators to recession, but rather post-recessionary signposts. To wit, with a hat tip to Eric Basmajian, yesterday’s 19th consecutive negative Leasing Indicator Index (LEI) print track record has only been surpassed in the Great Financial Crisis and the brutal recession of 1974. For good measure, Eric added that the Conference Board’s recession trigger is marked when the LEI’s rate falls below -4.5%; October’s -7.3% marked the 13th in a row beneath this threshold.

Looking back at what’s been a trying year, if it wasn’t for the constancy of the BLS’ negative revisions to the data – private sector payrolls have been revised down for nine months running -- we’d have long since moved on from being dismal to mad scientists.




Quotes of the Week:

Kronawitter: I continue to see the rationale for both a soft landing and a recession, and given we are in unprecedented territory in terms of economic context I don’t think anyone knows. But with the benign case mostly in the price now, I prefer to observe data and market internals over the coming weeks from the sidelines, rather than take the risk of an uncomfortable surprise


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(not just) for the ESG crowd:














Geopolitical Fare:


........ In other words, the White House is worried that a brief pause in the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza will allow journalists to report the truth about the Israeli massacre of civilians in Gaza, because it will hurt the information interests of the US and Israel. They are worried that the public will become more aware of facts and truth.

Needless to say, if you’re standing on the right side of history you’re not typically worried about journalists reporting true facts about current events and thereby damaging public support for your agendas. But that is the side that the US and Israel have always stood on, which is why the US empire is currently imprisoning Julian Assange for doing good journalism on US war crimes and why Israel has a decades-long history of threatening and targeting journalists. .....

Both the US and Israel have been attacking the press in this way because their governments understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world. They understand that while power is controlling what happens, ultimate power is controlling what people think about what happens. Human consciousness is dominated by mental narratives, so if you can control society’s dominant narratives, you can control the humans. ....

....... The US empire backs Israel for the same reason it backs most of the world’s dictatorships: because a globe-spanning empire can only be held together by nonstop violence and tyranny. Israel and other US-aligned states in the middle east are like the chair and the whip of a lion tamer — weapons used to violently abuse the populations of a crucial geostrategic region into compliance. It suits the empire perfectly to have a nuclear-armed government which exists in a constant state of war in the middle east governed by officials who speak English with American accents and interests which are reliably in alignment with those of the United States.

Stuart Seldowitz is not an aberration but a perfect manifestation of all this. This is the sort of mind which keeps the empire marching along from administration to administration no matter who Americans elect. This is the sort of mind which keeps the weapons flowing, the blood pouring, the fossil fuels burning, and the terrified screams which power the imperial machine continually erupting into the night sky.



...... In truth our world is ruled by tyrants who do whatever they want to do, and their actions are justified by the mass media who function as propagandists for the US-centralized power structure. Pundits weep and rend their garments over Russian crimes while defending, minimizing and obfuscating the far greater crimes of Israel, because Israel is a part of that globe-spanning power structure while Russia is not.

I have never been particularly interested in defending the Russian government. What I am interested in is opposing the murderousness of the globe-spanning power structure I live under, and all the lies, double standards and hypocrisy used to keep the murders going.


How did the Left go from defending the free speech rights of neo-Nazis to demanding censorship, falsely accusing their opponents of being fascists, and seeking their incarceration?



.... Canada has found itself sucked into a series of perilous foreign policy dilemmas that have left it struggling to balance its values, interests and identity. In particular, Canada now finds itself at loggerheads with both India and China — the two most populous nations and the rising powers of this century. ...







Science Fare:

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.


Intermittent fasting regulates biological time and improves disrupted sleep in an Alzheimer’s disease model.







......... We gave people a vaccine against a virus, that leads their bodies to get stuck on the wrong kind of immune response. This made the virus much more potent than it would otherwise have been and prevented it from dying out. The sort of immune response that our bodies now deploy against this virus rapidly becomes exhausted. Hence we see elevated levels of T cell exhaustion in the whole population.

I have spend a lot of effort, to educate people about this.

When you leave billions of people stuck with the wrong kind of immune response, you encourage a virus like this to mutate around that immune response. One way for this virus to achieve this, is by focusing more on infecting our brains, where our antibodies generally can’t reach due to the blood-brain barrier.

So now we have very neurovirulent SARS2 viruses constantly reinfecting us and depleting our immune systems.

In a future post I want to look more at how this problem is going to evolve in the years ahead, but I wanted to show you what their stupidity has caused.


Other Fare:



Are Studies Labelling Dissenters as 'Stupid' Undermining Democracy?

In an era where divisive political and social issues abound, a disturbing trend is emerging in the academic world. Recent studies appear to be aligning cognitive abilities and education levels with specific political and health-related beliefs, seemingly branding those who disagree with mainstream narratives as less intelligent or educated. This phenomenon raises a crucial question: Are such studies a subtle form of intellectual snobbery that undermines the very essence of democratic discourse?

Information is becoming as ubiquitous as the air we breathe but a troubling paradox is emerging: As our access to diverse viewpoints expands, the tolerance for differing opinions seems to be narrowing. Those who challenge the prevailing narrative are often not just disagreed with, but openly derided. But this isn't just a matter of hurt feelings or bruised egos; there's an insidious layer to it, one where academic studies are wielded as weapons to 'prove' the intellectual inferiority of those who think differently.



Almost everything that almost everyone says about meat-eating is stupid. Not everyone certainly, but most people. Usually, this isn’t because they’re dumb people but just because they haven’t thought about it much. But this is quite a screwed-up state of affairs. If you do something multiple times per day that millions of people think is seriously immoral—the worst thing you’re doing by far—then you should think about it for more than 5 minutes. Unfortunately, most people don’t do this, largely because most people are motivated by social conformity and use morality as a cudgel to favor the things that they feel passionately about. Most people care very little about morality in the abstract.

The worst crimes in history generally take place because they’re out of sight and out of mind. Ordinary Germans had heard stories about the terrible things going on in the Nazi death camps and had heard discussions of various massacres. Still, the worst excesses of them were things that they just didn’t spend much time thinking about. So if we you want to know where our society is going wrong, look to the places that everyone sort of knows about in the back of their minds but that almost no one seriously investigates. Two issues that are like that: donating to charities that can save huge numbers of lives and refraining from paying for the flesh of animals who lived their entire lives in unfathomable agony.

People find it deeply offensive when one compares factory farming to other atrocities like slavery and the holocaust. Now, this is in large part because people don’t like to be told that they’re complicit in one of history’s greatest crimes. But if holocaust comparisons are ever fair, then they’re fair here—billions of being are been kept in confinement to be killed later, often by gassing, often in ways that are far worse than gassing. If this was happening to humans, we’d call these death camps and call the practice a holocaust.

Now, perhaps you think that animals don’t matter much—that we can torture them for trivial pleasure and it isn’t a huge deal. But that requires a justification, and no justification that I know of that is remotely plausible has ever been given. Most of the justifications, such as the claim that we can torture animals to eat them because they’re not smart, would imply that it would be okay to reopen Auschwitz and Treblinka as long as we filled them only with the most mentally disabled.

Given that 92.2 billion land animals are killed every year, as long as you think that the death of an animal after it was tortured for its entire life is even slightly bad, factory farming will come in as one of the worst crimes in human history. .....

................ If you stop eating meat but start torturing your dog, total animal suffering will decrease. So if it’s wrong to torture a dog, then it’s also wrong to pay for meat, which comes from animals who lived in conditions of extreme agony. Eating meat causes much more animal cruelty than merely beating a dog so if beating a dog is wrong, so too must eating meat be wrong.

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Sunday, November 19, 2023

2023-11-19

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


Economic and Market Fare:


In his November 7, 2023 New York Times newsletter, the economist Paul Krugman asks a good, albeit belated, question: Why did so many economists get the inflation outlook wrong? After all, the near-consensus among mainstream economists in recent years was that inflation would persist – and even accelerate – and that this justified substantial interest-rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve. Yet the quasi-inflation of 2021-22 proved transitory.

Krugman poses his question with impeccable diplomacy, professing “respect” for three authors of a September 2022 paper published by the Brookings Institution (which was then promoted by Harvard University’s Jason Furman) projecting that it would take at least two years of unemployment at 6.5% to bring inflation back to the Fed’s self-imposed 2% target. But inflation had already peaked before the Brookings paper appeared, and long before the Fed’s rate hikes might have been felt. Over the next year, inflation petered out, even as unemployment remained below 4%. “Team Transitory” – which once briefly included US Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen – endured two years of derision, but it was correct all along. 

Krugman rightly focuses on the illogic of certain inflation “pessimists,” who “came up with new, completely unrelated justifications” for their contention that inflation would “remain stubbornly high” long after the 2021 fiscal stimulus packages had been absorbed. Since these pessimists encountered very little mainstream dissent, their doomsaying continued to dominate the discourse well into 2023..........


When Jeremy Siegel published his“Stocks for the Long Run” thesis, little was known about 19th-century stock and bond returns. Digital archives have made it possible to compute real total return on US stock and bond indexes from 1792. The new historical record shows that over multi-decade periods, sometimes stocks outperformed bonds, sometimes bonds outperformed stocks and sometimes they performed about the same. New international data confirm this pattern. Asset returns in the US in the 20th century do not generalize. Regimes of asset outperformance come and go; sometimes there is an equity premium, sometimes not.






Stocks are driven by stories. Stories such as AI, weight-loss medication, or CRE being a headwind for regional banks.

The bond market, on the other hand, is different. Bonds and credit are contracts. Contracts are formal and legally binding agreements about delivering future cash flows to investors.

The most remarkable difference between stocks and bonds is how unquantifiable stories are, how stories come and go, and how stories involve selecting certain facts and ignoring other facts.

At the moment, stocks are focusing on the rapid decline in inflation. But stocks could also have chosen to focus on rising delinquency rates on credit cards and auto loans, the rise in HY default rates, or the rapid decline in bank lending, see charts below. But these facts are complicated. So, for now, the stock market is holding on to the simple story that inflation is falling. Without the nuance that a rapid decline in inflation would often be driven by a rapid decline in the economy.

With Fed hikes every day biting harder and harder on consumers, firms, and banks, and rates staying high at least until the middle of 2024, the risks are rising that we over the next six months will get a soft landing in inflation and a hard landing in the labor market.

 

 




Stocks seem to be increasingly growing in conviction that inflation will slow sufficiently without the US economy rolling over. That is the dream-like scenario of a soft landing, but it’s also a dream. So, enjoy it while it lasts. ....



.......................... The IMF sums it up: “the medium-term outlook for global growth is at its lowest in decades. The IMF’s five-year ahead global growth projections have steadily declined from a peak of 4.9 percent in 2013 to just 3.1 percent in 2023, lowering the pace of convergence in living standards between emerging market and developing economies and advanced economies, while also posing challenges for debt sustainability and investment in the climate transition.” ...........







I've been predicting the demise of inflation for at least a year now, and today's CPI report makes it official—there's no denying that inflation has fallen to within spitting distance of the Fed's target. Not coincidentally, the market has finally acknowledged what I've been expecting for many months: the chances of another Fed tightening at this point are zero. The only issue now is when the Fed starts to cut rates; the market thinks the first cut comes at the May 1st FOMC meeting, while I think it happens much earlier.


... Absent shelter costs, which we know have been artificially inflated due to the BLS's flawed methodology (see Charts #2 and #3), the CPI is up only 1.5% in the year ending October '23. In fact, by this measure, inflation has been at or under the Fed's target for the past six months. ......

Is there any reason at all for the Fed to hold off on lowering rates until May? Not that I can see.

Monetary policy is manifestly tight, as reflected in a variety of indicators: 1) a significant deceleration in the rate of nearly all price increases, 2) a 57% plunge in new mortgage originations since early 2022 (i.e., high interest rates have severely impacted the housing market), 3) a 20% decline in non-energy commodity prices since early 2022, 4) at 2.3%, real yields on 5-yr TIPS (an excellent barometer of how tight monetary policy is) are substantially higher than their 28-yr average (1%), and 5) the yield curve is still inverted.

If the Fed remains true to form, they will wait too long to lower rates, just as they waited too long to raise rates two years ago. And that, in turn, means that when they eventually do lower rates, they will have to lower them faster and by more than if they were to start now. .....



If inflation was transitory, after all, what's next? We are expecting a resumption of the low inflation environment that occurred for many years prior to the Great Virus Crisis. However, there is already a strong whiff of deflation in the air. If that's what happens next, then the source will be China's economy, which is weighed down by its deflating property bubble and by its rapidly aging population. 





The resurgence of economic orthodoxy is a great example of how declining schools of thought can maintain dominance in the narrative for extended periods of time if the vested interests are powerful enough. In the case of the economics profession, mainstream New Keynesian theory persists because it serves the interests of capital. Recently, the IMF urged the Australian government to engage in ‘fiscal consolidation’ in order to support further interest rate hikes by the RBA aimed at reducing inflation quickly. In general, the IMF is urging nations to engage in fiscal austerity in order to bring their public debt ratios down. The problem is that even their own research shows that these fiscal adjustments on average do not succeed. And, usually, they leave a damaged society where the lower income and disadvantaged cohorts are forced to endure the bulk of the negative effects. ....



China Fare:

The Collapse of China’s Real Estate Bubble: Causes and Consequences
Successive defaults of China’s major property developers and the Evergrande Group filing for bankruptcy are triggering concern that the Chinese economy is becoming more like Japan’s. Could China be set to repeat the Japanese course, with a “lost 30 years” following an asset bubble’s collapse?



Quotes of the Week:


....... “Philip Carret, who wrote The Art of Speculation (1930), believed “motive” was the test for determining the difference between investment and speculation. Carret connected the investor to the economics of the business and the speculator to price. ‘Speculation,’ wrote Carret, ‘may be defined as the purchase or sale of securities or commodities in expectation of profiting by fluctuations in their prices.’”

Chasing markets is the purest form of speculation. It is simply a bet on prices going higher rather than determining if the price being paid for those assets is selling at a discount to fair value.

Benjamin Graham and David Dodd attempted a precise definition of investing and speculation in their seminal work Security Analysis (1934).

“An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”

......... Jeremy Grantham, GMO
“You don’t get rewarded for taking risk; you get rewarded for buying cheap assets. And if the assets you bought got pushed up in price simply because they were risky, then you are not going to be rewarded for taking a risk; you are going to be punished for it.”

.... George Soros, Soros Capital Management
“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.”



QTR: First, I’ll take to my mea culpa: I have been predicting that equity markets are going to move lower for the last two years, since rates have started to rise, and for the most part I’ve been wrong. This doesn’t mean I'll be wrong in the future, but it's important to know that thus far my timing has been poor, while I continue to believe that the fundamentals of my thesis – namely, that 5% rates on the largest outstanding bubble of debt in history - are still going to wreak havoc. ........................

This is the same type of stark, inevitable realization that we’re going to have about our economy: all this bullshit simply can’t fit into the confines of mathematics and reality.

We simply can’t keep rates where they are without something breaking, and the two-year lag that generally follows moves in monetary policy changes is all but behind us now: we are officially walking into the unknown and, ironically, it’s coming at the point when everybody is the closest to declaring victory.



Tweets of the Week:
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Vid Fare:






(not just) for the ESG crowd:

In a new “state of the climate” report, researchers admit that this year of climate records and continued inaction has scared them. Their vulnerability is neither strategic nor exaggerated—they’re just being honest.




If all proposed export terminals are built, the climate-warming emissions would be equivalent to 532 coal plants.







Kenyan president William Ruto has reinvented himself as Africa’s climate champion. But, his policy contradictions reveal that this is just his latest hustle.

Kenyan President William Ruto’s climate agenda is riddled with contradictions. From forestry to agriculture to energy to transportation and beyond, amassing greater power, prestige and wealth is the single thread that ties his policies together. His biggest hypocrisy—climate positivism, carbon markets, and win-win green growth—is no different.A student of the late dictator Daniel arap Moi, Ruto is a consummate opportunist and master storyteller. He is a chameleon deftly saying one thing while doing another to strengthen his political power and enrich himself at the expense of his fellow Kenyans. His public life has been plagued by charges of corruption and violence. Once he became President, he appointed allies, charged with everything from corruption to assault and rape, to top positions. It is an open secret in Kenya that political office is a personal business. No one embodies this more than Ruto.Ruto is a salesman first and a politician second. He gained the presidency by selling his ​​chicken-seller, rags-to-riches story. In this story, he is the hustler-in-chief among a nation of struggling hustlers. He is the everyman. This is an old story dressed in new clothes. He is more con man than hustler today. His newest con is win-win green growth. An old lie in new, green clothes.



Sci Fare:

..................... Through mass vaccination we’re forcing the CD8+ T cells to do the job these NK cells would normally be doing. And whereas the NK cells maintain their effectiveness despite growing genetic diversity of Spike, there’s now clear evidence of widespread T cell exhaustion in the population.

The impact of this problem will reveal itself as the circulating genetic diversity of the virus increases. You will need more and more CD8+ T cells, to do the same job as a given number of NK cells do.

The most important thing to take away from this is that there are persistent differences in the immune response between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. The IgG4 response has been discussed at length by me and others, but the CD8+ T cell dominant response in the vaccinated has to be kept in mind too.

The eventual outcome of this is the unravelling of the human immune system. That’s a big claim to make, but all the signs are there: The IgG4 response, the elevated level of T cell exhaustion that can now be observed in most of the population, the long COVID cases that increase with every new wave. ...



I have to point this out. There’s a new study that looks at what happens to dogs when they are infected by SARS2. I don’t endorse these experiments for obvious reasons, but I can’t ignore the news. They find that after infection, everything turns to shit. T cells infiltrate the brain, the blood brain barrier degrades, the vessels in the brain get fucked up and eventually neurons start dying too. This continues after the virus itself is gone from the brain.

That’s the thing with the “0.2% fatality rate” narrative. There’s a vast demographic of people who survive but have some form of lingering damage to their body. And then they get infected again. And you have to be really intellectually creative to just deny this growing pile of evidence that people’s brains are degrading as a consequence of their exposure to this virus.



Geopolitical Fare:

For a group of journalists and scholars, the ‘Nazigate’ scandal in Parliament seemed entirely predictable



................................. Israel’s allies keep trying to portray it as a rational actor and a positive force in the world, but if you listen to Israelis themselves you get a very different understanding of what this murderous apartheid state is actually about. 

As Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.


White South Africans realised their apartheid project was unsustainable; Israelis will, too.





As Palestine is openly genocided — as its children, hospitals, food, and water are destroyed — people are expected to condemn Hamas. Hamas, the force defending Palestine. The force fighting the colonizers in open battle, while Empire hides behind jets and computer screens. Why on Earth would I condemn Hamas? Do you think I write about anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism for clout?

I support Hamas. I hope they win. More power to them.

The western media just says the word ‘Hamas’, says nothing at all about them, and expects its racially conditioned audience to just bark along. They just say the world ‘Hamas’ and we’re expected to be scared because it’s Muslim sounding. I have been told to fear Muslims my entire adult life, while imperial troops kill, rape, torture, and steal ‘because’. I refuse to believe that bullshit anymore. Muslim people living in the land of the prophet are not the problem. The godless colonizers trying to steal their resources underneath are. ............

I also refuse to condemn Hamas because of their October 7th attack on Israel. That’s like condemning the Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion. You shouldn’t and I won’t. I’m with the people in the concentration camp, not the guards. The Al Aqsa Flood was a military hit against an occupying army and the Palestinians — and only the Palestinians — have a right to self-defense. The Al Aqsa Flood was a disciplined attack, killing many military personnel and zero babies. No physical proof of rape has been offered at all, because it didn’t happen. Hamas did take hostages to exchange for the thousands held by Israel, which is certainly scary, but that’s war. Israel, in its wild response, has actually killed those hostages just as it killed its own civilians on October 7th, bombing its own positions and strafing everyone out of pure cowardice and incompetence. I don’t condemn the Al Aqsa Flood. It was a righteous hit on the most evil colony of the most evil Empire ever. I’m with the rebels, not the Death Star. 

I especially reject the demand to condemn Hamas, based on the source. The Western media, which has backed every imperial war forever, has no place lecturing anyone on ethics.........







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Other Fare:

Dispersed power is hidden power, hidden power is unaccountable power, unaccountable power is illegitimate power, and illegitimate power does not deserve your compliance

Who, if anyone, or what, if anything, is in charge?

In many ways this is the question of the age, inspiring passionate debates across the ideological spectrum, with divergent answers springing not just from left and right but from every boutique micro-ideology howling within humanity’s splintered mind. ..........................

......... Politicians in our representative democracy don’t really decide anything. They serve as a distraction. They’re leader-shaped appendages of the managerial state, dangled in front of the public in order to draw attention away from the shapeless cloud within which actual power resides. They provide brief little bursts of hope – this guy will really change things! – and when the shine inevitably comes off, they act as lightning rods for popular discontent. The relationship of elected politicians to the permanent bureaucracy is essentially that of an anglerfish’s bioluminescent lure to its giant, toothy mouth. 

The entire system seems to be designed around maximization of the system’s ability to wield power, whilst diffusing responsibility such that identifying the actual source of power is nigh impossible, thereby shielding those wielding power on behalf of the system from any negative consequences of their decisions. ..............................

Cloaking power behind layers of anonymity and secrecy provides fertile soil for rampant and thoroughly justifiable paranoia, but the seeming futility of trying to reason with or in any way influence power also engenders learned helplessness. You can complain, you can meme, you can shitpost, you can write long analytic essays grappling with the nature of the managerial state, you can do deep investigations into this or that conspiracy, you can demonstrate at length the misguided nature, lack of empirical footing, and obvious deleterious consequences of this or that policy, but none of it seems to have any effect. It’s like fighting with mist. No matter how much you struggle, it just swirls around you. After a while, you stop struggling. Thus, the peculiar mood of our age: on the one hand, trust in institutions is at an all-time low, while suspicion as to the motivations behind institutional actions is at an all-time high ... but on the other hand, there is a pervasive apathy, a sense that there is nothing that can really be done about any of it. ........


A response to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's declaration "Why I am Now a Christian"

................. Thus, there are perfectly rational reasons to ground morals and values in universal humanistic principles, and these do not depend on adherents being theists or atheists. That they are universal principles mean that they apply to all people—Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, pantheists, deists, agnostics, and atheists. Whether or not there is a God—much less the Christian God—is irrelevant. That’s what universal means. ............

Atheism isn’t the alternative to the Judeo-Christian worldview, Enlightenment Humanism is. We can ground human morals and social values not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Kant’s categorical imperative, Mill’s utilitarianism, or Rawls’ fairness ethics, but in science as well. From the Scientific Revolution through the Enlightenment, reason and science slowly but systematically replaced superstition, dogmatism, and religious authority. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proclaimed: Sapere Aude!—dare to know! “Have the courage to use your own understanding.” As he explained: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” The Age of Reason, then, was the age when humanity was born again, not from original sin, but from original ignorance and dependence on authority and superstition. Never again need we be the intellectual slaves of those who would bind our minds with the chains of dogma and authority. In its stead we use reason and science as the arbiters of truth and knowledge.......


With a few more books and a few old ideas.

.... We can begin from a simple but really rather profound and worrying point: in most western societies today, there is a massive and increasing gap between what governments and medias say about the world, society and the economy, and the way that we experience these things in real life. I say “we,” because even the higher reaches of the Professional and Managerial Caste. (PMC), or the Inner Party, as I have come to call them, are aware of the reality of the world to some small extent: they just don’t care, and in any case the phantom society conjured up by speeches, documents and media reports from the PMC and its minions suits them just fine.

I think this is a situation unprecedented in western history. The average citizen is repeatedly told things and invited to believe things that they know cannot possibly be true, and are duly disproved by the unfolding of events; but which are then continually repeated, as though in fact they were true. Now, some who lived through the period of Communism in the Cold War have said much the same, but I think there’s an important difference. Those societies did in fact make efforts to improve the living standards of ordinary people, and to provide decent education and healthcare, all while running what amounted to a permanent wartime economy in peacetime. And the people of those countries were sufficiently mature to understand that they were being systematically lied to, in a way that we are not. After all, until the 1980s, western governments were on the whole efficient and effective, and, especially in the thirty years after 1945, they oversaw an unprecedented increase in the health, security and education of ordinary people. Rather like a frog boiled slowly in the famous saucepan, our societies today have difficulty in understanding that the institutions of the past have been sold off or neutered, the political systems have been totally corrupted, and the economy is just a way for the Inner Party to rob the people. Slow and quiet revolutions are always the most effective and long-lasting. ....


Daniel Schmachtenberger: An introduction to the Metacrisis





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