***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic and Market Fare:
The Fed has conquered inflation. It's time to start easing. The economy looks OK, no looming recession.
Chart #1 is arguably the most important chart that the market and the Fed have almost completely ignored for decades. Sure, everyone talks about the money supply (the best measure of which is M2), but no one talks about money demand. And as all students of economics should have learned, prices are set at the margin by the intersection of supply and demand. As Milton Friedman taught us, inflation happens when the supply of money exceeds the demand for it; so when there is an excess of money supply relative to demand, then prices rise and the value of the dollar declines. But without knowing money demand, which is half of the equation of inflation, we are in the dark when it comes to understanding inflation. To be fair to those who have ignored money demand, there is no direct measure of money demand. But we can infer what is happening with money demand if we just observe inflation: rising inflation must mean that money demand is falling relative to money supply.
And as subsequent charts show, there are other ways of understanding what is happening with money demand. .......
Rising money demand in 2020-21 kept the surge in M2 money from causing inflation. Falling money demand since 2021 has kept the decline in M2 money from causing deflation. .......
There’s an old axiom in the financial markets: “This time is different” …but it almost never is. History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself in the financial world but usually rhymes with previous economic cycles. Our goal is to flesh out the real possibility of avoiding an economic slowdown in the U.S. in 2024 amidst record tightening by the Federal Reserve (Fed) in 2023. The consensus of Wall Street analysts’ opinions is firmly in the “soft landing” camp, congratulating the Fed on a successful effort to slay inflation without pushing the economy into a recession.
On the other hand, history is very clear that the Fed has only achieved one soft landing in the past five decades and that was back in 1996. The fact of the matter is that the macro trends in periods similar to now show an overwhelming probability of a recession occurring. Timing being what it is, precise policy adjustments calculated to achieve a bullseye for the U.S. economy is like steering the Titanic to miss the iceberg; it is difficult, if not nearly impossible, to achieve. Forecasting a “soft landing” in 2024 is the quintessential forecast of “this time is different.” We are not saying it couldn’t happen, but we are saying that it could be worthwhile to consider the following macro trends before you are all in on the Fed “sticking the landing.”
Valuation is the first thing to consider when looking at the potential for a “soft landing.” Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the S&P 500 Index’s fair value for 2024 is ALREADY around current levels, meaning that a perfect “soft landing” scenario is already fully priced in. The most unexpected market event in 2023 was that equity prices rose not because revenues rose but rose solely due to multiple expansion. Is it possible for all the optimism to be borne out in 2024 and earnings grow into the “priced for perfection” valuation? Of course, it is possible, but data going back to 1950 shows it hasn’t happened. Current analysts’ earnings growth estimates for the U.S. in 2024 is just 1–1.5%. This is hardly what is required to grow into the current S&P valuation. Economic conditions have been deteriorating, not gaining momentum.
The ugly truth about 2023 is that only seven stocks accounted for nearly all the increase in the S&P 500 as well as the NASDAQ 100 and provided a cumulative return in 2023 of 75%. They also now make up roughly 30% of the S&P 500 while the other 493 companies make up the remaining 70%. We learned a very valuable lesson in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s (Nifty Fifty) and again in the ‘90s (.com era): Whenever a small group of companies become a large part of the largest, most liquid index of companies in the world and are awarded significantly higher valuations, the index has always ended up performing very badly. Could it be that this time it is different? ......
Dave Collum's 2023 Year In Review: Down Some Dark Rabbit Holes, Part 2
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Wisdom:
3 takeaways from my time at Variant Perception
1) Know your investment horizon (+ the tools to help you)
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Business cycles (Cyclical):
Howard Marks said that the persistence of cycles is largely due to the inability of investors to remember the past.
Knowing where you are in the business cycle goes a long way to dialing up/down portfolio risk. It helps that everyone looks at things differently… a lot of weight is placed on lagging and heavily-revised measures like GDP. Recessions are often modelled as linear processes, but all the empirical data suggests that recessions should be modelled as regime shifts; once the data tips, feedback loops can create very rapid moves in economic and market data.
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2) Be a good filter
Reading a wide range of material (not just finance…) is probably the best investment you can make for yourself. Warren Buffett quipped that everyone can read lots, but hardly anyone will. ....
3) Having fun in finance
It’s very easy to be a cynic in this industry, particularly with the rise of “fintwit”. I don’t really enjoy getting engaged in this because you end up feeling really bad about your mistakes.
Happily acknowledging your mistakes is so important for longevity. It’s hard to do this naturally, but it’s more like a muscle that needs to be flexed. Once I was able to do this, I had a lot more fun, and typically the best ideas were borne from a place of deep curiosity.
Being around people that also happily acknowledge your mistakes also makes a huge difference – Harvard’s multi-decade happiness study found that fostering positive relationships is the single-most important thing to make you happy. I’m grateful for the people I’ve met along the way and hope to continue investing in these relationships!
Wisdom:
Poor Charlie's Almanack (free online version)
2023 was a perfect example of how important it is to monitor price action and its behavior relative to your thesis. I’m no stranger to overcomplicating things. Sometimes I can’t help it. I want to feel smart or justify the time and energy I put into analyzing markets/portfolios. Legendary investor and founder of Oaktree Capital Management Howard Marks’ 2011 book, “The Most Important Thing” discusses first and second level thinking. I’ll summarize but go read the book if you haven’t - one of the best.
First level thinking is very straightforward. If the asset’s price is going up and earnings are growing, buy it. Don’t think too much, just keep it simple. First level thinking is not “What if” but rather “What is”.
Second level thinking is more complex. You evaluate the range of potential outcomes, compare your view to the consensus, and understand that asset prices are a reflection of the collective expectation of participants. It is more elaborate than first level thinking - but Howard Marks argues it is a required skill to become a superior investor. ......
Managing our emotions is a prerequisite for intelligent investing
“Many people possess the intellect needed to analyze data, but far fewer are able to look more deeply into things and withstand the powerful influence of psychology. … The biggest investing errors come not from factors that are informational or analytical, but from those that are psychological.” Howard Marks
................... In retrospect, the main reason I underperformed in 2009 had to do with innate traits that are probably hardwired in my personality. I tend to view the world with skepticism that all too often shifts into cynicism.
Skepticism is a healthy trait for investors but cynicism is not. ...........
“Greed is an extremely powerful force. It’s strong enough to overcome common sense, risk aversion, prudence, caution, logic, memory of painful past lessons, resolve, trepidation and all the other elements that might otherwise keep investors out of trouble. Instead, from time to time greed drives investors to throw in their lot with the crowd in pursuit of profit, and eventually they pay the price.”
...
“In the investment world, [fear] doesn’t mean logical, sensible risk aversion. Rather, fear — like greed — connotes excess. Fear, then is more like panic. Fear is overdone concern that prevents investors from taking constructive action when they should.”
Quotes of the Week:
...It is harder to run an idea meritocracy in which disagreements are encouraged than a top-down autocracy in which they are suppressed. But when believable parties to disagreements are willing to learn from each other, their evolution is faster and their decision making is far… pic.twitter.com/pzkKqJrMYf
— Ray Dalio (@RayDalio) December 30, 2023
Be wary of relying on anything else. Unfortunately, numerous tests by psychologists show that the majority of people follow the lower-level path most of the time, which leads to inferior decisions without their realizing it. As Carl Jung put it, "Until you make the unconscious… pic.twitter.com/iBlBjjk8lm
— Ray Dalio (@RayDalio) December 28, 2023
Charts:
0:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
........ As bad as 2020, 2021, 2022 and now 2023 were, I’m frankly terrified at the thought of what 2024 will bring, and that fear comes from knowing and corresponding with some of the world’s leading climate scientists. We can only speculate as to what a global average temperature more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels will do to our food systems. Maybe we will be lucky in 2024, but it will only be luck than enables stable food supplies from now on. ......................................
In 2024, as for the last five years, my focus will be on exposing the nonsense that Neoclassical economists have written about global warming. It’s taken 4 years to go from realising that their banal damage predictions were based on empirical nonsense, to getting a major report out (Keen 2023) which is having some media impact (“When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics“, “Economic models buckle under strain of climate reality“). But Neoclassical economists like Nordhaus will probably continue to be taken seriously on global warming until such time as the economy starts to fall apart because of it. I’m very pessimistic about the odds of policymakers and journalists realising that they’ve been conned until after it’s too late to do anything meaningful to reduce the damage.
Unless the Laws of Physics and Biology don’t apply to the economy, it’s only a matter of time before reality trumps the delusional expectations of economists. There’s no certainty that 2024 will be that year—and maybe there’s a natural explanation for the sudden jump in temperatures in 2023. But every year we continue on a business-as-usual approach brings closer the day when business-as-usual will no longer be possible. ..........
The most significant failure we have witnessed is not that current ESG & Impact investing has not yet delivered; it is that mainstream investing, for 100 years, ignored and still ignores negative externalities generated via their investment decisions. And gets paid for it.
Much has been said and written during 2023 about ESG investing, its shortcomings, weaknesses, as well as misinterpreted intentions of this investment philosophy. The core was and will continue to be the underlying premise this investment philosophy builds upon. Companies that manage relevant and material environmental, social, and governance aspects of their business operation, as well as how they manage what they produce, provide, and sell, will have a significant impact on their long-term valuation. ........
........ In this sense, climate change is not the result of a market failure but rather the outcome of a fully functioning capital-accumulating economy working hard to shift costs onto others, especially those who lack voice or power (such as the poor, future generations, children, and nonhumans).
Orthodox schools of thought and research traditions (including highly constrained forms of modeling), particularly in the fields of economics, energy, and climate, need to be challenged and replaced with, or complemented by, more heterodox approaches.
Transformations toward more sustainable and just futures require a radical reconfiguration of longstanding sociocultural and political-economic norms and institutions currently reproducing the very problems driving climate change. ...........
..... The message is clear. For all the pledges on this planet, we need to see reality for what it is. The underlying business models are not fundamentally changing, and those that do change, a limited number, tend to be smaller and less influential companies.
Growth is still generally not decoupled from CO2 emissions; growth projections of companies are still not aligned with their strategic Sustainability goals. Disclosure becomes a safe haven for endless pages of numbers and stories that mean nothing ...........
All wealth in the end is ecological. Economists contend that growth can continue indefinitely because they measure growth in terms of economic value rather than material throughput (Jackson and Victor 2019). Yet we diminish natural wealth and undervalue its exhaustion at our peril. Even in a highly financialised and service oriented economy, where direct connections to patterns of resource extraction and consumption are sometimes less observable, circulations of finance and the constant manufacture of ‘needs’ through advertising and exchange require resource inputs and lock in unsustainable behaviours. Assuming (often more by implication and neglect than explicitly), as many economists often do, that the environment is an infinite sink for waste and byproducts in pursuit of ever greater levels of production and consumption through market means is both naïve and dangerous (Daly 1996). Assessments of how economies perform, and wealth is generated, now need to start from a basic recognition of our dependence on the natural world and metrics adapted accordingly so that we can measure progress (or the lack of it) in building an economy compatible with life on earth and conserving the stocks and resources that sustain it. ....
This is where the attempt to reinvent growth as ‘green’ falls down (OECD 2011). The so-called Jevon’s paradox looms large here. Writing about coal nearly 150 years ago, Jevons showed how efficiency savings have the ironic and unfortunate effect of encouraging further energy use with the money saved (Jevons 1865). The phenomena whereby efficiency gains in a growth economy are often redirected towards overall increases in consumption highlights many of the limits of green economy thinking. .....
Gretchen Daily is working to make the environment more of an element in economic decision-making.
You’re Supposed To Be Glad Your Tesla Is A Brittle Heap Of Junk
Tesla cars are shoddily built pieces of shit liable to fall apart and malfunction in dangerous ways at inopportune moments. No, this is not a blog from 2012! It is also not a blog from 2015 or 2018 or 2022. It is not even a blog from two weeks ago about Tesla's self-driving systems killing people all over the place. It is a blog from today, Dec. 21, 2023.
On Wednesday, Reuters published a big, thorough investigative story documenting a pattern of major parts failures on low-mileage Tesla vehicles—and Tesla's organized years-long effort to obscure the pattern and offload its costs onto drivers, so as to sustain the illusion that it is a profitable company making cars that are not piece-of-shit death traps. ..... We are talking, in short, about engineering failures—failures that anyone would find alarming if they encountered them in a soap box derby racer made out of literally a soap box—happening, abruptly and without warning, to Tesla cars that are for all practical purposes brand new. Moreover, they're happening to lots of them, because of manufacture and assembly problems the company knew about, and hid, and lied about, and blamed on the poor suckers who bought its crappy cars.
The Reuters piece is quite long, and earns its length with an incredible wealth of damning receipts, including internal Tesla communications making clear that the company has known about its own shoddy work for a long time, even as it deceived investors, regulators, and drivers. I urge you to read it for yourself. ...........
Geopolitical Fare:
Lawrence: “A New Year’s note to readers.”
There must be many years at the end of which it is tempting to rank them among the truly awful. Maybe this thought is a comment on our times. Maybe there have been passages in history—there must have been—when those alive looked back with satisfaction at a year lived honorably and productively. However this may be, 2023 must indeed to go into the books as one of serial failures. All of these, or most, we have considered in our commentaries, so no need to rehearse them here.
I think we ought to look beyond the messes, cruelties, dishonesty, and corruptions to see the drift of things, our brief bit of the longue durée. This is positive, or has positive aspects to it.
Nick Kristof, the compulsively smiling Boy Scout of The New York Times opinion page, published a column this morning under the headline, “This Was a Terrible Year, and Also Maybe the Best One Yet for Humanity.” You always get the same thing with these kinds of pieces: The writers revert to statistics, abstract metrics that obscure far more than they reveal. ....
No, let’s leave the smiles to Nick Kristof. But let’s think for ourselves and recognize that the great arc of history bends in the right direction. The American imperium’s decline steepened the past year, the non–West’s influence rose, and the “rules-based order” is now exposed as the appalling fraud it is. More people are more aware now of the world as it truly is. More people understand mainstream media as propagators of propaganda, more people are reading and supporting independent publications such as those I write for ........
As the death toll in Gaza tops 20,000, Israeli-US lies about Al-Shifa hospital are newly exposed.
Streeck: Master and Servant
The Israeli massacre in Gaza is a catastrophe, and not just for the city’s tortured inmates, languishing for decades under a merciless occupation. The United States in particular, but also Germany, will forever be closely associated with this unrelenting slaughter of thousands of innocent men, women and children, a slaughter that both countries continue to underwrite materially and diplomatically. Two-and-a-half months into the mass killing, the US vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have restored some hope of survival to those Gazans still remaining after the hell of continual bombing and shelling. ......
When Israeli president Isaac Herzog described the assault on Gaza as a war “to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilization,” he wasn’t really lying. He was telling the truth — just maybe not quite in the way that he meant it.
The demolition of Gaza is indeed being perpetrated in defense of western values, and is itself a perfect embodiment of western values. Not the western values they teach you about in school, but the hidden ones they don’t want you to look at. Not the attractive packaging with the advertising slogans on the label, but the product that’s actually inside the box.
For centuries western civilization has depended heavily on war, genocide, theft, colonialism and imperialism, which it has justified using narratives premised on religion, racism and ethnic supremacy — all of which we are seeing play out in the incineration of Gaza today.
What we are seeing in Gaza is a much better representation of what western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned about in school. A much better representation of western civilization than all the art and literature we’ve been proudly congratulating ourselves on over the centuries. A much better representation of western civilization than the love and compassion we like to pretend our Judeo-Christian values revolve around. ....
And 90% aren’t eating every day.
The US could stop this tomorrow, Israel is a small country completely dependent on America.
The only country really doing anything to help is Yemen. .....
... The Yemeni statement on the US threats (it’s really a US operation, the rest of the nations are there to pretend it’s multinational) is sad, in the sense that this is the only truly moral nation in the world in relation to Palestine..
Muhammad Al-Bukhaiti: Even if America succeeds in mobilizing the entire world, our military operations will not stop unless the genocide in Gaza stops and food, medicine, and fuel are allowed to enter its besieged population, no matter the sacrifices it costs us.
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........... Throughout my life I’ve had a positive view of Jews and Jewish culture because so many of the people I’ve admired and been influenced by have been Jewish, but other than that it’s not something that I’ve really thought about much. This notion that opposition to the criminality of the Israeli government is driven by a demented hatred of Jewish people is a complete work of fiction. People in our society simply do not feel that way about Jews. Real antisemitism does exist, but it’s a small fringe view. Normal people just want the mass slaughter of children and the ethnic cleansing to stop. .....
Hedges: The Death of Israel
Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime ..........
............ Israel is a pariah state. This was publically on display on Dec. 12 when 153 member states at the U.N. General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 — including the U.S. and Israel — opposed and 23 abstaining. Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.
How the USA is leaving behind not only devastation but hardened enemies, too.
With Israel and the West committing genocide against the Palestinians to ethnically cleanse Gaza, the only outside (de facto) government that has lived up to the elementary demands of the most basic ethics – as well as the UN 1948 UN Genocide Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute – by taking direct military action to confront the perpetrators is that of Yemen. Otherwise, the heroic Palestinian Resistance defenders of Gaza stand alone. ......
That is the dystopian hell world we really live in: Its strongest (for now) states commit and support a genocide and ethnic cleansing war of extermination, proudly announced by the Israeli perpetrators and broadcast in detail for the whole world to watch in real time. Rich-world war tourists, meanwhile, get on planes to get their slice of the mass murder action and post about it on X.
It is left to Yemen, a poor and small country, itself recently ravaged by a brutal war of bombing and starvation, conducted under the leadership of Saudi Arabia and, of course, backed by the West, to do what all of us should be doing: help Palestine and fight Israel. It is an additional irony that the governments that perpetrate the genocide, whether directly or by being complicit, deny recognition to the one government that acts according to international law and intervenes. ........
........... We’ll discuss the multiple fronts ‘Israel’ is fighting on, but first it’s important to remember that ‘Israel’ is a front. ‘Israel’ would collapse in a week without western munitions, they’re just there because Empire wants them there, as a garrison state near the gas station. All of Israel’s allies—the UK, Europe, Australia—are fronts also. They’re just America’s bitches, barking. America itself is a front for what I call White Empire, the continuous regime of colonization that changes capitals and keeps going.
These carbon crusaders are what the ‘Axis of Resistance’ is fighting, and the rebellion has spread in every direction. From the moral center of the Al Aqsa mosque, the Al Aqsa Flood has spread to the north, south, east, and west. Countless long-suffering people have answered the call of the long-suffering people of Palestine (and some notable nations haven’t). We’ve gone over who the Resistance is previously. Now we’ll discuss where they are, and what they’re doing to resist.
This is the Praxis of Resistance. ...........
.................. Now bear in mind that we’re only discussing one war Empire is embroiled in, they’re also getting their ass-kicked in Ukraine, trying to start another war with China, and couping everybody from Haiti to Peru to Pakistan. White Empire — centered in America — has bitten off more than it can chew and is choking to death on its own hubris. Unfortunately a dying empire can still kill lots of people, but mark my words, it’s ending. .....
There is an important and perhaps easily overlooked lesson here. Even those of us awake enough to know that America is a very evil empire, addicted to dominance, militarism, violence, and lying, may sometimes be missing something. The US has such a knack of devastating those societies it targets that it is easy to see nothing else: They make a desert, again and again and again, and they hardly even bother anymore to call it peace, to paraphrase a famous speech ascribed by Tacitus to an anti-Roman resistance leader.
Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq,… and the list is far from complete. US power to punish – and if not traumatize and subdue than traumatize and cripple – by laying waste is so overwhelming that it has a stunning effect far beyond its victims. It almost seems as if this empire can only win, because even when it loses, as it does quite often, it still makes an example of those who defied it. Ask in Afghanistan, for instance.
But it is also doing something else: With all its brutality and cruelty, Washington is also constantly enlarging the camp not only of those who hate it, and for very good reasons, but those to whom it has done its worst, whether by lethal economic or even more lethal military warfare – and who nonetheless are still standing. Ansar Allah is a classic example of this. So are Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, and, in a much bigger way, actually, even China and Russia.
The USA, in short, is creating, even fostering not only its own worst but toughest enemies: leaderships and whole societies who know exactly how vicious America is, but who have lost their fear. ..........
Lawrence: To Retrieve History
........ A new year is about to begin. What do we see as we peer across the great divide on our calendars into the other side of midnight, Dec. 31, 2023? As the case of Ukrainian children makes plain, the first thing we see is that we cannot see very well, so thoroughly have our media blurred our vision. “The only thing that can save the world,” Allen Ginsberg remarked in 1973, “is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world.” This seems as true and urgent now as it was 50 years ago. Let us, then, look through the blur to see as best we can. ............
I would say it is the same in the case of Israel except that it is worse. Israel has already lost the war in Gaza—the war that is not, in fact, a war but a murder spree. It will succeed tactically, on the ground, but its strategic defeat is a fait accompli. It is strong language, but I will use it: These months of barbarity, with more to come, mark out Israel as a failed state. It is a chaotic entity that depends on violence toward others for its existence, and the violence depends on an irresponsible sponsor. It is inherently, institutionally discriminatory and adopts the apartheid system from white South Africa. ........
It has been said many times that those without a past have no future. Or that without a past one is marooned in an eternal present with no prospect other than repetition of the what is, as I call it. There is the famous line from Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, quoted so often it is cliché, but there seems no avoiding it given its merciless pertinence to our condition: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” ........
Sci Fare:
Other Fare:
********** How The Hell Did We Get Here?
Maybe what we need is not just a new form of poultry farming but a complete revolution in how we relate to meat.
Bereft and suicidal, I lay on my sofa. Only David Foster Wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does
Fake, Gay, and DIEing of AIDS
The year we realized the universities can’t be saved, and shouldn’t be.
......... Claudine the Fake and Gay is one of them. She is, in a sense, all of them, the distilled essence of their entire class, the embodied avatar of the modern academy. ....
She is a professional black woman, writing about black woman things, and therefore a perfect figurehead for a narcissistic academy filled to its frothy brim with professional sodomities writing about sodomy things, professional women writing about woman things, professional Muslims writing about Muslim people things, and professional trannies writing about things you really wish they’d keep to themselves.
Some have have expressed bewildered amazement that Harvard could not have found a black woman of actual academic accomplishment, rather than, you know, her. I have no doubt that such black women must exist, but this complaint misses the point. Fake and Gay was appointed to her position not in spite of her pathetic scholarly record, but because of it. For the legions of posers and frauds occupying the offices of Harvard’s department, her unimpressive contributions make them feel safe. She’s just like them. She won’t make them look bad. By ostentatiously lowering the bar so far it drops into the dirt, she reaffirms that the rest of them can carry on doing what they’ve been doing – which is to say, nothing that matters to anyone. Including themselves.
Essentially everything in the universities is now at best irrelevant, at worst openly fraudulent.
Lest you think this is isolated to the departments of grievance studies, I assume you, there is no succour to be found in the austere Apollonian hallways of STEM. ........
Biomedical faculties operate as the marketing departments for Big Pharma, pushing placebos and poisons for profit.
And then, of course, there is the COVID-19 scamdemic, in which every element of the academy was an enthusiastic participant. What can you say about an institution that abandoned centuries of epidemiological knowledge to slobber at the clay feet of the ill-considered mandates of power? .........
The academy cannot be saved. The rot is too deep. The problem is not a tiny stage 1 melanoma that can be excised with a bit of surgery and a pat on the hand, but a metastatic cancer that has spread to every tissue within the organism. To remove every infected cell would be to remove every cell. To cure the body would be to kill it.
Which is exactly what we should do.
Put the universities out of their misery.
That which is falling, should also be pushed.
Like monasteries isolated from but lavishly supported by the outside world, in which elaborate prayers are chanted only for the ears of the monks, the universities no longer serve any socially useful function. They serve only themselves. The young minds entrusted to them are not sharpened by intellectual training, but dulled by postmodern superstitions, and deranged with deliberately induced schizoid psychoses. Sinecures are provided to charlatans more suitable as janitors. Insofar as there are any talented intellects still within the ivory towers (and there are still a few), those minds are squandered on self-referential nonsense of no benefit and much harm to the species. The universities have become pointless concentrations of financial and intellectual capital locked away from any productive use for reasons that make sense to no one but themselves. .....
Pics of the Week:
