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Saturday, December 28, 2024

2024-12-28

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


Economic and Market Fare:



A softening in the market is a harbinger of things to come — in both equities and the real economy



Bubble Fare:


....... I’m mostly referring here to investing. We now live in a world where Nvidia is worth more than the entire Hong Kong stock market. It’s the bubble of fools that never ends because there’s always a new fool to come along.

......... You all just basically created a world where the only way for a young guy without wealthy parents to buy a house is to pour his salary into Bitcoin for a few years. The only people I know who ended up with some money are people who got involved in this Bitcoin thing and just blindly and autistically poured all their money into it, never questioning what this thing is, whether the world actually benefits from having it.

...... We all live in a world, where the most retarded thing now just works the best. Microstrategy just uses debt and share issues to buy Bitcoin, its stock shoots up, then it sells more shares to buy more Bitcoin, causing the price of Bitcoin to shoot up, causing its balance sheet to shoot up, causing its stock to shoot up, to which it then responds by selling more shares to buy more Bitcoin. Then eventually it gets into the NASDAQ 100 and index investing boomers just buy it on autopilot, so it doesn’t drop down again.

And you think to yourself: “It can’t go on like this forever.” Nope, that’s right. It can’t go on like this forever, but it can go on just long enough to make sure you’re margin called. ..............................



Quotes of the Week:


We have reached crisis levels of doubt. It is The Age of Unenlightenment or what Brett Weinstein calls the Cartesian Dark Ages.ref 1 NSA analyst and radical Islam expert Stephen Coughlin says he no longer knows who is calling the shots.ref 2 How do you know what is a fact? AI-generated images and videos have reached near-perfection. The pathological liars in the mainstream media spew agitprop for the pathological liars inside the beltway, all backed by the pathological liars of the Deep State running the fact-check programs. .................

Every year I denounce people who shy away from conspiracy theories. When you find yourself saying, “I am not a conspiracy theorist but…” you just revealed that you are one. Embrace the label. Men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you disagree, I am baffled that you made it this far through this document. Buckle up because it is gonna get much worse. Michael Shermer, a professional debunker of conspiracy theories, included in his book Conspiracy a series of metrics somebody came up with to determine whether a theory is weak or strong. Michael morphed it into a metric of how nuts you are. He should know because he is a professional! He probably works for the See Eye Ay. As an aside, the word “debunk” is inherently flawed because it implicitly presumes the conclusion that something is wrong, and then you set out to prove it. I read and write to see where it takes me. It might show my suspicion I was right or wrong, but the theories I choose to examine—the rabbit holes I go down—are pre-determined to be worthy of further study. Occasionally, I am told to “stay in your lane.” I try to resist my favorite response—“You sack of shit”—which happens to be exactly the phrase I use when somebody doesn’t use their blinker. Then I calmly point out that nothing important is accomplished by people worried about staying in their lane. .............................................................

........................... I remind you that, in the recorded history of civilization, there is no example of a grotesquely overvalued market that did not become undervalued. I will repeat this below, which is a sign of conviction or senility. Gravity is undefeated, and regression through the mean is nearly a truism. ..................................



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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Welsh: Some countries need less population

......... The world is overpopulated by humans and our domesticated animals. We are in classic population overshoot.

When climate change and ecological collapse and resource depletion hit, there isn’t going to be enough food to go around. ...............



.................. There isn’t really anything useful to do in our current situation except vegan advocacy. It is where all the different problems come together. Obesity? We know what works. Climate change, deforestation? We could give three quarters of our farmland back to nature, simply by eating vegan. That last quarter that we keep for ourselves, would be mostly covered in trees with edible nuts and fruits. And underneath those trees, you could then easily grow crops like strawberries and blueberries. ................



...................... It’s a lot. As my psychiatrist said to me 20 years ago when I was suffering under the weight of seeing what’s in store, “John, anyone who is not at least a little depressed is not paying attention.” The sense that we are losing our ability to cope is also the wake-up call that might not simply trigger us to hit the snooze button this time. .............



U.S. B.S.


.............................. Lippmann was a progressive Harvard-educated technocrat who believed in engineering society from the top down, and who understood the role of elites in engineering social change to be both positive and inevitable. It was Lippman, not Noam Chomsky, who coined the phrase “manufacturing consent,” and in doing so created the framework in which the American governing class would understand both its larger social role and the particular tools at its disposal. “We are told about the world before we see it,” Lippmann wrote. “We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.” Or as he put it even more succinctly: “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.” 

The collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid on which Lippmann’s assumptions rested, and its rapid replacement by monopoly social media platforms, made it possible for the Obama White House to sell policy—and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices—in new ways. In fact, as Obama’s chief speechwriter and national security aide Ben Rhodes, a fiction writer by vocation, argued to me more than once in our conversations, the collapse of the world of print left Obama with little choice but to forge a new reality online.

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves. .............................


Trump’s ‘billionaire boys club’ has parallels in other supposedly liberal democracies around the world.



Geopolitical Fare:




................... It doesn’t have to be this way. We’re fed mountains of stories by the rich and powerful explaining why things must remain as they are — but they are only stories.

Every sociopolitical status quo throughout history has had power-serving narratives explaining why things are as they are and justifying why the people in charge live so much more comfortably than the ordinary folks doing the real work in this world. People used to be told that kings received their authority directly from God, and were therefore better and more worthy than the unwashed masses. Today we have different rulers with different narratives justifying their rule and explaining why vast inequality is fine and good, but those narratives are exactly as fictional as the old stories about the divine right of kings. .....................



Today Drop Site News is publishing a landmark investigation about the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s unrelenting assault on Gaza by British journalist Owen Jones. His report is based on interviews with 13 journalists and other BBC staffers who offer remarkable insights into how senior figures within the BBC’s news operation skewed stories in favor of Israel’s narratives and repeatedly dismissed objections registered by scores of staffers who, throughout the past 14 months, demanded that the network uphold its commitment to impartiality and fairness. ...................


Here's what his final war powers report to Congress is hiding from the public





................. Why is all this happening to our neighbors? It would be easiest to attribute Europe's strange behavior to the degeneration of the elites, deprived of any basis for a thoughtful attitude to reality over several decades of living under the patronage of the United States. Especially since after the Cold War, European politicians found themselves in a position where they could only compete with themselves - an occupation that is not very demanding .....................

Perhaps the most striking aspect of modern Western Europe is its lack of reflection. Even the continent’s intellectual elite seems to live behind a wall of denial, detached from reality. This attitude extends to domestic politics, where the rise of non-mainstream parties is dismissed as voters “choosing the wrong way.” In foreign policy, its leaders continue to act as though their opinions still shape global politics, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

The EU states march on, oblivious to their diminishing power and the shifting global environment ..............



Sci Fare:






Other Fare:



Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses.

Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding.

It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste, and just aren’t reading anymore. But what has actually occurred is death by committee.

One hundred years ago, there were dozens of publishing houses and a robust publishing landscape. This is the idea of publishing that so many of us still have stored away in our collective memory—a competitive marketplace in which publishers needed to nurture, court, outbid, and out-promise each other in landing both emerging and established writers. This process gave us—among so many others—Flannery O’Connor, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin.

No longer. Mirroring many other American industries, publishing has followed the path of consolidation, starting when Random House bought Knopf in 1960. What followed was a fifty-year feeding frenzy of mergers and acquisitions. In 2012, when Random House and Penguin merged, we were left with today’s “Big Five”: Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. The result is a monopsony, a market dominated by only a few buyers. In the absence of genuine competition, monopsonists, like monopolists, have a tendency to reject the laborious pursuit of quality in favor of short-term profit. ...........



Human behavior is shaped by a complex interplay of life’s events, conditions, and circumstances. To truly understand a person’s actions and behaviors, one must ask: What was this person exposed to? What did they experience? These questions point to a profound truth: behavior cannot be separated from the environment in which it develops. From the safety of one’s surroundings to access to proper nutrition, sleep, and social stability, the circumstances of life have a lasting biochemical effect on the brain. These experiences are not merely coincidental with development, they actively shape it. ............................................

Part of the problem is that psychiatry doesn’t operate above the fray. It’s deeply embedded in societal systems that prioritize profit, productivity, and conformity. These systems capitalize on human differences, sorting people into winners and losers, normal and abnormal, healthy and disordered. Psychiatry’s methods and conclusions are shaped by these systems, making it complicit in perpetuating the very problems it seeks to address.

Psychiatry thrives within a system that rewards it for treating symptoms rather than addressing root causes. To question the societal constructs that drive mental distress would be to challenge the very foundations of the profession’s authority and economic success.

If psychiatry is to truly help people, it needs to move beyond its current framework. ...................


Please just get it over with

.................... And now we have to see this South African abomination, this technoponzi scam artist who has been promising full self driving next year for the past ten years, this delusional guy who is an obvious swindler to anyone with a triple digit IQ, taking over the US government, controlling this fat old demented orange goblin like a puppet master. I really don’t know how I’m supposed to bear witness to this, for the next four years.

It’s just a recipe for complete mental illness, to spend every day stuck in this overpopulated panopticon, working on something that you know is doomed to fail. I don’t know how people do it. It has to be the least rewarding thing possible, to wake up in the morning, go to your shitjob and to come home, watch whatever the algorithm recommends to you and realize you’ll have to do this forever, as some 95IQ influencer spends two years taking pictures of her ass and is set for life. ........................



Pics of the Week:





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Saturday, December 21, 2024

2024-12-21

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Where Does $6.8 Trillion in Government Spending Go?


Fed officials trying to figure out just-right interest rate and some think they might be close to that destination



I know that Trump wants to be seen as the bull market president, but MAGA is not a bull market set of policies. Sure, he’ll be great for some industries, but those are the industries that are beaten down and unloved. He’ll create bull markets where there have been epic bear markets. Meanwhile, accelerating nominal growth, along with high interest rates, are terrible for the sorts of businesses that are dominating the markets today. What if 2022 was a dress rehearsal for what the rest of the decade looks like?? Think back to what worked then, and what didn’t work. I think we’re about to have an inflection back to the strategy book of 2022. If so, we’re going to catch a whole lot of investors offsides



.......... And so, after it first revised the 12 months ending March 31 by 818K, the downgrades extended into the second quarter of 2024, when the Philadelphia Fed early benchmark estimates showed that instead of the 1.1% gain shown initially by the BLS, payroll jobs in the 50 states and the District of Columbia were actually down 0.1%! 

..... And while we don't yet know the specifics of the revisions - those will be revealed on Feb 7, 2025 when the final numbers are published - at the national level, we do know that all the jobs reportedly "created" in the second quarter, were actually fake, there were no net jobs created at all, and in fact, the US lost jobs in Q2!


Neoliberal economics is a superstitious, secular, totalitarian religion. It's past due time to nail some theses to the doors of Central Banks. It's all based in rules, and rules can change.






The day after the Wall Street Journal ran Why This Frothy Market Has Me Scared, it published More Men Are Addicted to the ‘Crack Cocaine’ of the Stock Market. We encourage you to read both in full if possible ........



Bubble Fare:

With US equities at record valuation peaks, investors should re-examine their risk appetite



On Friday December 6th, the U.S. stock market pushed to the most extreme level of valuation in U.S. history, based on the measures that we find best-correlated with actual subsequent 10-12 year S&P 500 total returns, as well as the depth of subsequent losses over the completion of market cycles across a century of data. That’s not a forecast. Rather, it’s a statement about current, measurable, observable market conditions.

While we’ve seen an initial retreat based on concern that the Federal Reserve may lower interest rates less aggressively than hoped, record valuations leave the market vulnerable to a hundred risks, not just one. Presently, our most reliable valuation measures exceed those observed at the 1929 and 2000 peaks, and I continue to view the period since early-2022 as the extended peak of the third great speculative bubble in U.S. history.

The chart below shows our most reliable gauge of market valuations in data since 1928: the ratio of nonfinancial market capitalization to gross value-added (MarketCap/GVA). Gross value-added is the sum of corporate revenues generated incrementally at each stage of production, so MarketCap/GVA might be reasonably be viewed as an economy-wide, apples-to-apples price/revenue multiple for U.S. nonfinancial corporations. 

The chart below shows the relationship between MarketCap/GVA and actual subsequent 12-year S&P 500 average annual total returns, in data since 1928.
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It’s tempting to imagine that our valuation perspective relies on the assumption that current profit margins are unsustainable. Yet even if one takes average profit margins over the past decade at face value (as the Shiller cyclically-adjusted P/E does), and even if one takes Wall Street’s unprecedented expectations for year-ahead profit margins as the basis for market valuation (as the S&P 500 forward operating P/E does), market valuations are presently at levels observed only surrounding the 2000 and 2022 market peaks. Indeed, given the fairly linear relationship between the forward operating P/E and the Shiller CAPE, we can get a good sense of what the forward operating P/E would have looked like on a historical basis, had data on this measure been available. Presently, valuations are easily above the 1929 extreme even on these measures.

While preparing charts for this month’s comment, I checked on an older valuation measure that I constructed decades ago. The chart below shows my original “weighted price-to-fundamental” ratio (WtdP/F), which is a composite of the S&P 500 price/peak-earnings multiple that I created back in 1998 (Alan Abelson of Barron’s wrote a nice article on it back then), along with scaled price/revenue, price/dividend, and price/book multiples for the S&P 500. It should not be a surprise that the WtdP/F is also at record extremes.
A key feature of the bubble period since 1995 is that average valuations have been substantially above their long-term historical norms. That observation makes it tempting to assume that valuations have simply “shifted” higher. As Graham and Dodd described this temptation in 1932, “the conclusion to be drawn was not that the stock was now too high but merely that the standard of value had been raised. Instead of judging the market price by established standards of value, the new era based its standards of value upon the market price.”

On this point, it’s important to recognize that there’s a remarkably stable mapping between the level of reliable valuation measures and the level of subsequent annual returns. For any given set of future expected cash flows, higher valuations imply lower returns, and lower valuations imply higher returns. .....................

..................................................................................... Between the optimistic extremes in investor expectations for future returns, and valuations implying precisely the opposite, there is an enormous bubble in the gap, hiding in plain sight.

I’ve often described a market crash as “risk-aversion meeting a market that is not adequately priced to tolerate risk.” That perspective may be particularly relevant given that prevailing S&P 500 valuations and Treasury yields easily imply the most negative estimated risk-premium in history, based on estimates that are tightly correlated with actual subsequent S&P 500 total returns in excess of Treasury returns across a century of data – and there are lots of estimates that have little or no such reliability.
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...................... Even here, it’s notable that nearly nobody has picked up on the deterioration in civilian employment growth, which has already gone negative on a year-over-year basis. Civilian employment is part of the “household survey” that determines the unemployment rate, as opposed to the “establishment survey” that provides the headline month-to-month “non-farm payroll” figure. Given our emphasis on signal extraction and noise reduction, our preference is always to extract the common signal from a very broad range of independent or partially correlated sensors. In my view, we would still need more evidence to expect a recession with confidence, but we certainly shouldn’t rule out that outcome even in response to the possibly sizeable disruptions that may be just ahead.



China Fare:

Ten-year yield falls to 1.71% after economic data releases



Inside China's Export Ban on America's Must-Have Metals



Quotes of the Week:

Powell: “We're in a good place, but I think from here, it's a new phase,”



Charts:
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2:  DB: YE 2025 Treasury yield expectations (average 4.2%) are a bit lower than current levels with only 4% believing we’ll end 2025 >5%
"Where do you see 10-year US treasury yields by year end 2025? We will bucket the answers, so slide as near as possible to your desired answer:"
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Narrowing storm bands may be a surprising and dangerous new feedback of climate change



What if I told you the next energy revolution isn't in the sky, but under your feet?

 Deep underground, beneath layers of dirt and ancient rock, an endless furnace burns hotter than the surface of the sun.

It's been running since Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago, generating enough heat to easily power all of humanity. 

This vast energy source has always been tantalizingly out of reach. But armed with a newly repurposed technology, three American startups are now racing to tap into Earth's natural power plant.

Temperatures reach 10,800°F at Earth’s core. Just a few miles down, the rocks are hot enough to boil water instantly. This is the source of geothermal energy.

The heat locked in Earth's crust holds more energy than all the world's oil, coal, gas, and uranium combined—and it’s not close .............





Geopolitical Fare:


......... These two stories together say so much about the way the label “terrorist” is used under the US-centralized power umbrella.

The guy who shot the health insurance CEO is a terrorist, but the people systematically slaughtering civilians in Gaza are not terrorists. The people fighting against those who are slaughtering the civilians are terrorists, and noncombatants are being categorized as belonging to this terrorist organization in order to justify killing them. The al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria were terrorists, but now they’re a US puppet regime so soon they won’t be terrorists — but they need to be designated terrorists for a little while longer because the claim that Syria is crawling with terrorists is Israel’s justification for its recent land grabs there. The Uyghur militant group ETIM used to be a terrorist group, but now they’re not a terrorist group because they can be used to help carve up Syria and maybe fight China later on. The IRGC is a military wing of a sovereign nation, but it counts as a terrorist group because of vibes or something.

Is that clear enough? .............



............. The U.S. and Israel are high-fiving that they have successfully wrecked yet another adversary of Israel and defender of the Palestinian cause, with Netanyahu claiming “credit for starting the historic process.” Most likely Syria will now succumb to continued war among the many armed protagonists, as has happened in the previous U.S.-Israeli regime-change operations.

In short, American interference, at the behest of Netanyahu’s Israel, has left the Middle East in ruins, with over a million dead and open wars raging in Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine, and with Iran on the brink of a nuclear arsenal, being pushed against its own inclinations to this eventuality.

All this is in the service of a profoundly unjust cause: to deny Palestinians their political rights in the service of Zionist extremism .......


The Romanian Constitutional Court’s decision to nullify the election results based on unfounded allegations of Russian interference sets a terrifying precedent







Other Fare:




This isn’t about all the high minding crap she said (lost the confidence of the PM, etc…) it’s an attempt to pressure Trudeau to resign, so the Liberals don’t have him as an albatross hung around their neck during the next election. The Liberals will still lose, I’d think, but they won’t get slaughtered, or that’s their hope.

Freeland has terrible politics. She’s the worst sort of neoliberal. She’s been Trudeau’s strong right hand, and done most of his dirty work. Given this is the case, I don’t think she’ll make a good candidate if she’s the new Liberal leader.

Pollievre, the Conservative leader, will probably be the next Prime Minister. He’s right wing of the modern American variety. Nativist, nasty, and stupid. About the only good thing I can say about him is that he’ll fight if Trump goes ahead with tariffs. ........





...................... To be clear, I don’t believe that this gradual enshittification is part of some grand, Machiavellian long game by the tech companies, but rather the product of multiple consecutive decisions made in response to short-term financial needs. Even if it was, the result would be the same — people wouldn’t notice how bad things have gotten until it’s too late, or they might just assume that tech has always sucked, or they’re just personally incapable of using the tools that are increasingly fundamental to living in a modern world. 

You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather. 

It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness. 

These people want everything from you — to control every moment you spend working with them so that you may provide them with more ways to make money, even if doing so doesn’t involve you getting anything else in return. Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and a majority of tech platforms are at war with the user, and, in the absence of any kind of consistent standards or effective regulations, the entire tech ecosystem has followed suit. A kind of Coalition of the Willing of the worst players in hyper-growth tech capitalism.  ........................


UnitedHealth Group is not an insurer, it's a platform. And it's in the crosshairs as Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley propose breaking it apart, severing its pharmacy arm from the rest of the business

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Monday, December 16, 2024

2024-12-16

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Wall Street’s market forecasts are too tepid. The S&P 500 could rally next year on a combination of AI growth and deregulation. But investors should prepare for a wilder ride.

.............. But history rarely is reasonable. Over the past 100 years, the stock market was more likely to gain 10% to 20% annually than 0% to 10%, according to Deutsche Bank data. Overall, stocks gained 20% or more 39% of the time, while dropping 26% of the time. An average year, which analysts are predicting, doesn’t happen all that often, despite the frequency of such predictions. ....



........ Shelter prices increased 0.3% for the month. *Everything* else all together *declined* -0.2%. On a YoY basis, shelter increased a little under 4.8%, its lowest such reading in almost 3 years. All other prices increased 1.6% YoY, the 19th month in a row they have risen less than 2.5%. In the broadest terms, high inflation remains almost all about shelter. .............


...... Now let’s discuss the other remaining problem child, transportation services. As I wrote yesterday, transportation services (mainly insurance and repair costs) lag vehicle prices. In November, vehicle prices increased a strong 0.9%, while transportation services increased less than 0.1%. On a YoY basis, vehicle prices remain *down* -2.2%, while the increase in transportation services costs slowed to 7.1%, which is bad, but still the lowest in nearly 3 years


Analyzing the two biggest sectors that drive the overall labor market



Freeland released her statement in a post on X, pulling no punches (emphasis ours) .....


........... Perhaps Freeland and Fraser see the painful writing on the wall for their boss....



Bubble Fare:

It’s time to bet against American exceptionalism

Having tagged America’s inordinately large share of global financial markets as “the mother of all bubbles” in my last column, the main pushback I got, even from the few people who share my view, was that there is no sign this bubble will deflate any time soon.

Almost no one foresees an imminent pop. Virtually every Wall Street analyst predicts US stocks will continue outperforming the rest of the world in 2025. But all this enthusiasm only tends to confirm that the bubble is at a very advanced stage. If the consensus on “American exceptionalism” is so overwhelming, who is left to hop on the bandwagon and inflate it further? .....

......... But every hero has a fatal flaw. America’s is its sharply increasing addiction to government debt. My calculations suggest it now takes nearly $2 of new government debt to generate an additional $1 of US GDP growth — a 50 per cent increase on just five years ago. If any other country were spending this way, investors would be fleeing, but for now, they think America can get away with anything, as the world’s leading economy and issuer of the reserve currency.

......... The longer a trend lasts, the more confident investors get, and the more indiscriminately they buy into the mania. In the late stages of a bubble, prices typically go parabolic, and over the past six months US stock prices have outgained others by the widest margin for any comparable period in at least a quarter century. When flying in such thin air, it doesn’t take much to stall the engines. All the classic signs of extreme prices, valuations and sentiment suggest the end is near. It’s time to bet against “American exceptionalism”.





Quotes of the Week:

Delwichhe: We are 10 trading days into the “best month of the year for stocks” and every day so far has seen more decliners than advancers on the S&P 500. I’ve been watching the market for a quarter of a century and have never seen more sustained weakness beneath the surface.


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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


......... Nations of the world meet at annual COP meetings (Conferences of the Parties), where they promise to reduce emissions to “net zero” at some distant date, an almost meaningless pledge. There is no plan to actually stabilize climate. ....................

But where is scientific advice? The UN is served by a huge scientific apparatus, but we hear little scientific objection to the farcical climate “strategy” at COP meetings. Voluminous IPCC3 reports contain good data, but what good are data alone? Scientists are the physicians of the planet. We have a moral obligation for diagnosis and advice. My comments here are based on a paper4 published a year ago in Oxford Open Climate Change and a paper5 accepted for publication in Environment, which my coauthors and I expect to be in the January 2025 issue.

Global temperature (Fig. 1) took an unprecedented leap of half a degree Celsius in the past two years, which confounded the climate research community. The warming coincided with an El Nino, but the El Nino was weak and could cause warming of only a quarter of a degree, half of the observed warming. Another big factor had to be involved, which we suggested in the Oxford Open paper was the “Great Inadvertent Aerosol Experiment” caused by restrictions on the sulfur content of ship fuels (Fig. 2), imposed in coastal regions in 2015 and on the global ocean in 2020. .............

Implications of the aerosol effect are staggering. Warming of the ocean surface will not go away. We are now living with an ocean that provides increased drive for strong storms and extreme flooding. Global temperature will decline a bit as the tropics goes into its La Nina phase, but we are now living in the +1.5°C world, averaged over the Nino cycle, and we are headed higher. An even more important implication is that climate sensitivity is not 3°C for doubled CO2, which has been IPCC’s best estimate. When aerosol effects are accounted for, observed global warming implies a climate sensitivity of 4-5°C for doubled CO2. This high climate sensitivity, combined with steady or declining aerosol cooling implies that global warming will accelerate more – unless the growth of greenhouse gas forcing declines rapidly. Thus, an honest assessment of the growth of greenhouse gas forcing is in order. Is the world making progress toward stabilizing climate? .................



A large majority of voters gave the Biden administration a failing grade on the economy. For the sake of future policy battles, it is worthwhile to try to understand their reasons.

................ If voters are unhappy with the good readings on standard indicators—unemployment, the monthly inflation rate, economic growth—it must be because those indicators no longer connect to their sense of well-being. 



Geopolitical Fare:






It’s pretty wild how the west went directly from “We need to occupy Afghanistan for two decades to prevent it from being taken over by the Taliban” to “Yay! Syria’s been taken over by al-Qaeda!”

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The IDF has moved to occupy new stretches of Syrian land in the name of protecting its safety and security in the wake of Assad’s removal, to approximately zero condemnation from the western power alliance.

One of the dumbest things we are asked to believe about Israel is that the only thing it can ever do to ensure its safety and security when a danger presents itself is to grab more land. Land grabs are always the answer.

So to recap:

Russia invading a country in the name of protecting its security interests from perceived threats on its border = wrong, evil, worst thing ever.

Israel invading a country in the name of protecting its security interests from perceived threats on its border = fine, normal, nothing to worry about. 

❖

The US is considering removing Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham from its list of designated terrorist organizations following the al-Qaeda affiliate’s victory in Syria. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: “terrorist organization” is a completely arbitrary designation which is used as a tool of western narrative control to justify war and militarism. In effect it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”. .......



Syria has fallen.

It is now highly likely that the country will fall apart. Outside and inside actors will try to capture and/or control as many parts of the cadaver as each of them can.

Years of chaos and strife will follow from that.

Israel is grabbing another large amount of Syrian land. ..............

With the fall of Syria Iran has lost the major link in its axis of resistance against Israel. Its forward defenses, provided by Hizbullah in Lebanon, are now in ruins.

As the former General Wesley Clark reported about a talk he once had in the Pentagon:
"This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
Six of the seven countries mentioned in that famous memo have by now been thrown into chaos. Iran is -so far- the sole survivor of those plans. It will urgently have to further raise its local defenses. It is high time now for it to finally acquire real nuclear weapons.

The incoming Trump administration sees China as its major enemy. By throwing Syria (and Ukraine) into chaos the outgoing Biden administration has guaranteed that Trump will have to stay involved in the Middle East (and eastern Europe).

The massive U.S. 'Pivot to Asia' will again have to wait. This gives China more time to build its sphere of influence. It may well be the only power that has been a winner in this.





Sci Fare:




Other Fare:




The New York City Police Department has just issued an urgent bulletin, warning corporate CEOs that "kill lists" bearing their names and other information have begun appearing online.

This is an outrage, given that everybody should know that only presidents are permitted to possess kill lists for the extrajudicial assassination of alleged terrorists with remote control Predator drones. Mere citizen   Luigi Mangione sure had some nerve summoning up his inner Barack Obama and devising his own "disposition matrix" to rationalize the killing United HealthCare executive Brian Thompson last week. ...........


All Stories Are Propaganda

................. Let’s pick an extreme example: The massive, monstrous, sophisticated lies perpetrated by the US state department and military and “intelligence” community about almost everything they are doing across the globe, faithfully repeated by bought-and-paid political lightweights, and transcribed in op-eds and “news from a reliable source” reports by naive and incompetent reporters. We might (except for the odd reality-denier and conspiracy-theorist among us) readily agree that this is mostly propaganda. But if the perpetrators believe what they propagate to be true, is it still propaganda? What if they believe it because they want to believe it, even though the evidence they are ignoring overwhelmingly shows it to be false? What if they know it to be false, but think it’s essential that the public believe it to be true, to make the world a better, safer place?

We might say it’s propaganda if they ‘know’ it to be false, and otherwise it’s not. But that seems a meaningless distinction if the outcome — a public that is persuaded to believe falsehoods — is the same. And when we get into intent, we are likewise on slippery ground. If they’re ideological morons like Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland or Canada’s deputy PM Chrystia Freeland (author of this preposterous nonsense), they likely believe (like many neocons) that the end justifies the means (the means being what we probably see as bald propaganda), and they are likely incapable of separating truth from fiction ..............


QsOTW:

“What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”



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