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Sunday, January 28, 2024

2024-01-28

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


Economic and Market Fare:




BOC Keeps Rates Unchanged At 5% As Expected, Signals End Of Rate Hikes

.... “There was a clear consensus to maintain our policy rate at 5%,” BOC Governor Macklem said in his prepared opening remarks for a news conference scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Ottawa time. “What came through in the deliberations is that Governing Council's discussion about future policy is shifting from whether monetary policy is restrictive enough to how long to maintain the current restrictive stance.”

The dovish message is the clearest hint yet that the bank sees a rapidly slowing economy and believes its past rate increases, some 475 basis points in less than two years, are sufficient to quell inflation. That also opens the door to rate cuts in coming months.

“If the economy evolves broadly in line with the projection we published today, I expect future discussions will be about how long we maintain the policy rate at 5%,” Macklem said, suggesting that just like the Fed, the question now is when the BOC will cut. ....




I don’t know if it’s just my feed of X posts and research, but the chorus of analysts pushing back on the amount of cuts priced into the market was deafening this month. Last week we saw a number of Fed speakers push back on the market pricing in a full cut for March and over six 25 bp cuts for 2024. Even Fed Governor Waller tempered his enthusiasm over cuts, caveating that they should be measured. The market responded, chopping 36 bp off pricing of cuts this year and lowering the probability of a March cut to less than 45%.

Now we are seeing the pushback against the pushback - Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan both recommended on Monday to go long 5 year Treasuries. Former Fed governor Bullard said last night that he believes the Fed will cut before inflation reaches 2%, and that a cut could come as soon as March. Bullard is no longer on the Fed anymore, but he was one of the most influential governors during his tenure, and the market weighs his opinion perhaps even more than some of the current sitting Fed board members who are less influential .....


I believe that inflation will not only surprise to the downside this year, but that the global economy will remain in a low inflation environment for longer than expected. I point to many of the factors that inflationistas are citing (deglobalization, geopolitics, climate, and fiscal dominance) and argue that those factors all working against inflation at the moment. ...

.......... Seasoned commodity traders know that high prices invite more supply, which in turn brings about lower prices. Look at a chart of oil, natural gas, or grains today and you’ll see a picture of commodity deflation, not inflation. ......

US fiscal spending was indeed a significant driver for inflation in 2022 and 2023, but the fiscal impulse is due to contract in 2024. The US will still incur a sizable budget deficit this year, but it is the relative change from the previous year that determines the government’s contribution to GDP and inflation on a percentage growth basis. .......





Central bank feels pressure to cut interest rates as falling inflation raises real cost of borrowing


US exceptionalism consensus creates downside risks. The US consumer looks like a paper tiger, while labor hoarding + distorted inventory cycle are further masking underlying vulnerabilities.









The conventional wisdom on China has shifted but still misses the bigger picture.




After an era of cheap money, it’s not just the quantum of debt in the system that could be a problem

........... Leverage is also an arms race in which the authorities are handicapped. As Hyman Minsky observed, “in a world of businessmen and financial intermediaries who aggressively seek profit, innovators will always outpace regulators”.  

The real constraint is that over time the economy has become reliant on speculation to generate activity and paper wealth, backstopped when needed by governments and central banks using public resources to maintain financial stability. Ultimately, it is difficult to limit leverage in a world where everyone is incentivised to get rich quickly using other people’s money.


In what will be the largest revamp in nearly two decades, the central bank intends to replace its two main macroeconomic models with a new core model for forecasting and analysis



Investment Wisdom:

Eternal verities in investment and finance are often counterintuitive


....................... The credit bubble provided perfect support for the instability hypothesis of the US economist Hyman Minsky. He asserted that extended periods of financial stability breed complacency and excessive risk taking. In 2003 in the FT I relayed Minsky’s thoughts while pointing to the debt spiral. In the same year, I argued in my book Going Off the Rails that asymmetric monetary policy, whereby central banks failed to curb market euphoria but backstopped markets when they plunged, was undermining capitalism’s immune system. Banks’ risk management techniques were also fundamentally flawed. I concluded that the cycle would end with a credit crunch followed by system-wide deleveraging.

But here’s the rub. It is impossible to predict the precise timing of a bubble’s bursting. So I and most others who predicted the crash won no plaudits. An echo in modern journalism of Cassandra’s plight in antiquity. 
 




Vid Fare:




Quotes of the Week:

Roger Altman: What I think is fascinating is how wrong the consensus on big things has been over the past year, starting with inflation where originally—when it surged—the view was this is transitory, it will self-correct. Jay Powell himself espoused that. Then, as it surged further that view was discarded and the Fed of course embarked on the sharpest monetary tightening in 40 years. Now, it looks as though it was transitory, just over a somewhat longer period, including that the tightening of monetary policy may have had no impact on why inflation has come down…. Then recession, six to nine months ago, a majority of CEOs in surveys thought we were going to have a recession, now we don’t have it and the most recent data is amazing…so recession is off the table….



Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:




There is a growing body of evidence that the 2024–2030 period will present us with a critical juncture, upending a centuries long era of economic growth. No, it will have nothing to do with climate change or novel viruses: those two will come somewhat later. Missing entirely from mainstream discourse there is a greatly overlooked side of our predicament, which will set a nice little ‘game of musical chairs’ in motion most probably around 2025. Fasten your seat belts, while you can. .......................

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Knowing how petroleum output affects everything we do, the significance of passing this civilizational tipping point cannot be overemphasized. Again, this has very little to do with subsidies or finance: we are about to pass a point of diminishing returns from an energetic and geological perspective. ...........

With less energy comes less complexity. After a few years perhaps a decade into this crisis-mode, it will no longer be possible to uphold current institutions and large political structures. The reasons, as always: the gap between interests too wide, the costs of maintaining central control too high… ......

There is absolutely nothing new in this. Every civilization — ours included — grew by living up its one time inheritance, be it fertile topsoil or petroleum, overshooting both the natural carrying capacity of its environment and the non-renewable resource base it relied on. Then, as resources got depleted below a critical level, they all went through their respective phases of collapse.

Decline is a perfectly normal, easy to understand part of every society’s life. Once you move beyond denial and bargaining it becomes clear as daylight, that is has its causes in our biology, physics, and Earth’s geology. There is really no one to blame. There is really no super-duper technology holding the key to saving civilization either. It was a wholly unsustainable proposition from the get go.  ....
Is this a time for optimism or pessimism when it comes to climate change? This is a time for deep, deep pessimism. In this article we will talk about the reasons why pessimism is warranted, and the actions it should be prompting humanity to take. .......

...... Everything in the preceding paragraph is real, and all of it is true. Even so, all of it is insignificant in the big picture. The reason why it is insignificant is because of these five facts:

  1. Humanity has spent the last century, and particularly the last 50 years, destroying Earth’s ecosystems.
  2. This destruction is happening on multiple fronts, including: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane in the atmosphere, plastics on land and sea, ocean acidification, planetary overheating, and so on.
  3. Much of the destruction is already baked in. Meaning: even if humanity could somehow immediately stop the processes of destruction that are underway, much of the destruction has already happened irreversibly, and the destruction has momentum that will take decades more to stop.
  4. Humanity is doing very little actual work to stop the processes of destruction. For example, there is no hope of “immediately stopping the processes of destruction” (or anything close to that) given current trends.
  5. Thus, humanity stands on the brink of at least ten imminent catastrophes. To write the article above and present this tone of optimism, the author has ignored these imminent catastrophes. Any one of these catastrophes would be terrible. In combination they have the potential to be civilization-ending
.......










Geopolitical Fare:

How Europe Became A Sacrifice Zone

If you look at a map, Europe is not a real continent. Europe is in Asia, with just an imaginary racist line separating them from the horrible hordes of us. If you look at a map of military bases, European countries are not real either. The whole place is occupied by America, with just an imaginary sense of superiority separating them. America runs the military and economy of Europe, into the ground if it wants. America blows up German pipelines at will, commits European resources into wars, sanctions the resources they depend on. European countries are just America’s henchmen, and you know what happens to henchmen when the boss is in trouble. They’re the first to get shot.

America — which actually rules the White Empire now — has started not one but multiple wars in Asia. This is understandably causing blowback in Europe, because Europe is in Asia. When America sanctions Russian energy, it’s actually Europe that gets cut off. When America militarizes the Red Sea, it’s again Europe that gets cut off. America actually makes money off these misadventures, while Europe pays the cost. .......

The ‘Europeanization’ of Ukraine just means that Europe gets fucked while America fucks around ......

Yemen was only blocking ‘Israeli’ ships, but since America started bombing them, now the whole Red Sea is blocked up, especially to American and British vessels. America took a limited problem that could be solved by just not genociding Palestine and aggravated it by starting another war they can’t win. Who cares, right? It’s only the henchmen that take real damage. America keeps having brain farts, and Europe is where the shit comes out. .....

Europeans think they’re better than America but they’re literally America’s bitches with better cheese.  ........ They talk about ‘defending western civilization’, but the world knows damn well that’s just genocide and theft, and that it’s controlled by America now. Europe is just America’s sacrifice zone. They’re political pawns with cardboard crowns. .....


Escobar: The Ukraine Charade, Revisited

Keep the Forever Wars engine running
There is a total void of “leadership” in Washington. There is no “Biden”. Just Team Biden: a corporate combo featuring low-rent messengers such as de facto neocon Little Blinkie. They do what they’re told by wealthy “donors” and the financial-military interests that really run the show, reciting the same old cliché-saturated lines day after day, bit players in a Theatre of the Absurd.

Only one exhibit suffices.

Reporter: “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?”

The President of the United States: “Well, when you say working, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”

The same in what passes for “strategic thinking” applies to Ukraine. .........

The elites in charge are way more clinical than the whole Team Biden. They know they will not win in what will soon be country 404. But the tactical victory, so far, is massive: enormous profits out of the frantic weaponizing; totally gutting European industry and sovereignty; reducing the EU to the sub-status of a lowly vassal; and from now on plenty of time to find new proxy warriors against Russia – from Polish and Baltic fanatics to the whole Takfiri-neo ISIS galaxy.

From Plato to NATO, it may be too early to state it’s all over for the West. What is nearly over is the current battle, centered on country 404. ......



.... Given Frum’s track record of advice about wars, one wonders why anyone would take his advice. ...

... How many times does Frum have to be wrong before he fades away into the obscurity he so richly deserves? ......

........ Frum and others in the neoconservative camp (like Max Boot, Robert Kagan, and Bill Kristol) seem to jump from war to war, crusade to crusade, always searching for the next enemy for other Americans or “allies” to fight. ......





........... Gaza exposes the mainstream western liberal ideology for the kayfabe performance it always has been. The job of the so-called liberal “moderate” has never been to oppose racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or genocide, their job is to perpetually give the thumbs-up to one head of the two-headed monster that is the murderous western empire. Their job is to help put a positive spin on a globe-spanning power structure that is fueled by human blood. To help elect Bidens and Starmers and Trudeaus and Albaneses who will ensure that the gears of the empire keep on turning completely unhindered while paying lip service to human rights and social justice.

The one faint glimmer of brightness in this profoundly dark chapter in human history is that it might start opening some eyes to the fraudulence of the mainstream fake-left political faction that has been marketed to the western public as an alternative to far right depravity. That westerners might start awakening to the reality that everything they’ve been trained to believe about politics, their government and their world is a lie. Such an awakening would be the first step toward a mass-scale movement into health.





Israel Accuses The ICJ Of (You Guessed It) Antisemitism

.......... In any case the butchery in Gaza still urgently needs to be ended, and only time will tell whether Friday’s development had any major effect on the outcome of this horror. 

But man what I wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall at the meetings they were having at the US State Department on Friday. It’s days like this that remind you why empire managers switched from talking about “international law” to using the meaningless phrase “rules-based international order”.



Sci Fare:




Other Fare:

Intellectual humility is defined as a willingness to admit you’re wrong. It could be just the idea for our self-righteous times.



I BOW TO few in my admiration for the anthropologist, economist, radical leader, and delightful prose stylist David Graeber, who died unexpectedly in 2020 at the age of 59. Since I read his little book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology in 2004, I’ve been telling anyone who seemed inclined to listen that he was the most important anarchist thinker since Peter Kropotkin, who died in 1921. His ideas, including those beautifully captured in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), helped motivate and shape the Occupy movement, which took inspiration from his commitments to radical democracy, egalitarianism, and “prefigurative politics”—the idea that people seeking to make a revolution should try to live and organize now in a way they’d want to arrange their lives together in the future. .......



Pics of the Week:



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Wednesday, January 24, 2024

2024-01-19

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


Economic and Market Fare:


....... One of the great “mysteries” this cycle has been how negative leading indicators have been for the US economy, yet measures such as GDP have remained resilient, or even significantly positive, as reported for Q3 2023 to date.

ECRI has gone on to build off that earlier LEI-driven work, so the Conference Board’s version is closer to using dial up for internet vs broadband, but it is publicly available so it is the one most often referenced.

The gap which has opened up has driven many to doubt the efficacy of LEI’s, but through the lens of the broader Kayfabe framework, this cycle’s events are easily explained. As laid in Schrodinger’s Bank, the details of each cycle are unknowable in advance, so I am not going to pretend to have anticipated all details, and this Substack has not been about making “predictions.” Rather, this has been about offering an alternative variant perception with the hopes of helping people better understand the world around us as it unfolds. ......

... Remember - every cycle is different and hidden interdependencies are a feature and not a bug. Obviously, it would be great to figure all this stuff out in advance in order to profit from emerging trends, but that is a completely separate conversation. This post is about trying to explain what has been occurring and what it may mean going forward. ...

... The October secondary peak was 0.27% and the most recent report for December was -1.14 for a total move of about 1.40% (rounding).

With the important caveat of it being a single data point amidst the Fog of Cycles, it is certainly possible it will get revised away, was a data quality problem, etc.

But given the setup, through the lens of Kayfabe self organizing criticality, it could also be evidence of phase transition to the very unusual shock absorbers present this cycle finally capitulating.



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........... So I’ve said the balance of risks favor higher interest rates, wider credit spreads, lower corporate margins, and lower equity prices. It’s also useful to think about where the risks are in my risk assessments. If we get lower interest rates, instead of higher, then it’s very likely due to the economy being a lot weaker than it currently is, and the Fed ends up having to ease more than 150bps in 2024. That seems unlikely to me, but if it happens then notice that probably also means that credit spreads will widen and corporate margins, earnings, and stock prices decline. So, if you’re bullish on bonds and stocks, it seems to me you’re taking a dangerously narrow path. The balance of risks to me look bearish on both sides of that, but the bullish outcome for bonds implies (I think) a bearish outcome for stocks. It’s difficult for me to see an environment with appreciably higher stocks and bonds


Authers: Slower for Longer — Inflation Has Stopped Falling
The stall gives the Fed little reason to start early rate cuts, even though the market still expects them.


Summary:
US inflation surged starting in spring 2021, with Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation reaching a 40-year high of 9 percent in mid-2022. Together with improving supply-chain conditions, policy tightening by the Fed decreased inflation to within 1 to 2 percentage points of its 2 percent target by late 2023 without a significant increase in unemployment. However, concerns have been raised that the last mile of disinflation to reduce inflation consistently to its 2 percent target will be more arduous than the previous miles. Close examination of such concerns indicates that they do not receive compelling support. Because the last mile is likely not significantly more arduous than the rest, it is unlikely that the Fed needs to exert extraordinary effort in terms of additional policy tightening as inflation nears its target. Such tightening unnecessarily increases the risk of a “hard landing.”

Key findings:
1. The notion that the last mile of disinflation is more arduous than the previous miles does not receive compelling support.
2. It is unlikely that the Fed needs to exert extraordinary effort in terms of additional policy tightening to bring inflation down the final 1 to 2 percentage points to consistently reach its 2 percent target; such tightening unnecessarily increases the risk of a “hard landing.”



The long-duration, tech-focused trade is looking increasingly fragile, while low-duration sectors such as energy, utilities, as well as small caps and value, are becoming cheaper. ...




Developing countries will have a hard time breaking the vicious cycle of debt and poverty, World Bank economists warn

....... “Record debt levels and high interest rates have set many countries on a path to crisis,” said Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist. “Every quarter that interest rates stay high results in more developing countries becoming distressed.”


China Fare:


from the archives:




(not just) for the ESG crowd:







A leading proponent of vertical farming discusses how urban areas should adapt to a perilous environmental future.



Geopolitical Fare:


Secretary of State Antony Blinken doesn't so much want the genocide to end as he wants to put a more humanitarian gloss on the ongoing slaughter and starvation of Palestinians by the State of Israel.  Why call for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Gaza or the freeze in US military aid - when all that the world really needs is love, sweet love. Not to mention great big globs of self-serving propaganda from American Empire. ...



...... So the US and the UK just bombed the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 


From the beginning of its war on Gaza, Israel has intentionally targeted journalists. As of 8 January, 109 journalists have been killed. Of those, “at least 96 . . . were deliberately and specifically targeted by surgical Israeli strikes against them, at home or in the line of duty. . .”

... The intentional targeting and killing of journalists is a flagrant, unequivocal violation of international law—a strategy employed only by the cruelest and most despotic of regimes to hide their crimes. It is only because of the work of journalists—those who have been killed and those who are still living—that the world knows what is truly happening to the people of Gaza. They have provided clear documentation of genocide, enabling South Africa to file a claim against Israel at the International Court of Justice on behalf of the citizens of Gaza.

Obviously, Israel would rather carry out its project of genocide and ethnic cleansing without it being documented. In what must be understood as an obscene form of retaliation, Israel has targeted the family members of journalists as well.



.............. That’s right kids: when Yemen sets up a blockade to try and stop an active genocide, that’s terrorism, but when the US empire imposes a blockade to secure its geostrategic interests in the middle east, why that’s just the rules-based international order in action. 

It just says so much about how the US empire sees itself that it can impose blockades and starvation sanctions at will upon nations like Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria and North Korea for refusing to bow to its dictates, but when Yemen imposes a blockade for infinitely more worthy and noble reasons it gets branded an act of terrorism. The managers of the globe-spanning empire loosely centralized around Washington literally believe the world is theirs to rule as they will, and that anyone who opposes its rulings is an outlaw.

What this shows us is that the “rules-based international order” the US and its allies claim to uphold is not based on rules at all; it’s based on power, which is the ability to control and impose your will on other people. The “rules” apply only to the enemies of the empire because they are not rules at all: they are narratives used to justify efforts to bend the global population to its will.

We are ruled by murderous tyrants. By nuclear-armed thugs who would rather starve civilians to protect the continuation of an active genocide than allow peace to get a word in edgewise. Our world can never know health as long as these monsters remain in charge.






Other Fare:

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Monday, January 8, 2024

2024-01-08

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


Economic and Market Fare:





Balancing Churchill’s Caution, Truman’s Expectations, And Gandhi’s Wisdom In The Age Of Chaos

In the realm of economic forecasting, the concept of a trilemma emerges as a thought-provoking framework. This trilemma, which I refer to as the Truman-Gandhi-Churchill trilemma (or the TGC trilemma), encapsulates the perspectives of three influential figures: former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the 33rd President of the United States Harry S. Truman, and the revered Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi. It finds relevance in our current situation as we endeavor to forecast the glide path and resting point for interest rates into 2025. By navigating the TGC trilemma with caution, practicality, and humility, we seek to uncover insights that challenge consensus and shed light on the likelihood of interest rates heading lower than currently believed.

The term “trilemma” is derived from the Greek words “tri,” meaning three, and “lemma,” meaning proposition or assumption. Trilemmas can occur in various fields and contexts, including philosophy, economics, politics, and decision-making processes.

In today’s investing world, a trilemma emerges. Do we adopt Churchill’s strategy and make predictions only after events have occurred—a perspective embraced by many forecasters on Fintwit and Wall Street? On the other hand, Truman would seek a one-handed economist willing to make forward-looking calls, believing that such an approach could lead to optimal returns. Or do we follow Gandhi as he reminds us that mistakes are inevitable? It is essential to recognize the uncertainty and unpredictability when making portfolio decisions. Investing is hard and investors must navigate this trilemma, acknowledging the potential for errors and the limitations of foresight in an ever-changing world.

In light of this, it is worth considering the words of Charlie Munger, one of his generation’s top investors, who recently passed away at the age of 99. Munger once famously said, “I’m constantly making mistakes where I can, in retrospect, realize that I should have decided differently. And I think that is inevitable because it’s difficult to be a good investor.” Munger’s candid admission underscores the challenges faced by even the most seasoned investors, further emphasizing the need for humility and continuous learning in the face of uncertainty.

It is within this gripping tapestry of perspectives, where the TGC trilemma takes shape, that we find ourselves confronted with a profound question: How can we navigate this complex labyrinth and avoid the pitfalls of ambivalence while embracing the humility of uncertainty? As we delve deeper into this enigmatic conundrum, a startling revelation emerges—the case for a federal funds rate below the natural rate of interest. .......




..... The evidence is unambiguous. There never was going to be a struggle to bring inflation under control. Its return to mean, low, rates was always inevitable, and it is happening.


Hussman: The Return of Buy-Low Sell-High



Bubble Fare:



Investing Wisdom:

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Tweet Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


Current lawsuits could create a framework for suing fossil fuel companies over their role in the environmental crisis





Geopolitical Fare:

Mearsheimer: Genocide in Gaza

I am writing to flag a truly important document that should be widely circulated and read carefully by anyone interested in the ongoing Gaza War.

Specifically, I am referring to the 84-page “application” that South Africa filed with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.1 It maintains that Israel’s actions since the war began on 7 October 2023 “are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic … group in the Gaza Strip.”  That charge fits clearly under the definition of genocide in the Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.

The application is a superb description of what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is comprehensive, well-written, well-argued, and thoroughly documented. ......


By obscuring and falsifying the lessons of the Holocaust we perpetuate the evil that defined it.

.................... We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of “At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.

“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.” ...........



It honestly blows my mind that there are still people adamantly supporting Israel after all this. After all the people they’ve killed. After all the lies they’ve been caught in. After all their comments endorsing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and all their actions showing they mean it. 

If you’re still supporting Israel at this point, you’re just telling everyone you don’t care about truth or morality. You’re announcing to the world that you care only about your weird ideological agendas and geopolitical control. 

You are publicly proclaiming that you are a dogshit human being. That you have lived on this earth all these years without arriving at any level of emotional or psychological maturity. That you have wasted your life on this planet.

❖

Wait til the Zoomers figure out that Epstein did what he did because he was running a sexual blackmail operation for Israeli intelligence.

The most significant aspect of the Epstein story is not that he helped some famous people rape minors, it’s that powerful intelligence agencies use child sex slaves and sexual blackmail to exert control over our society.

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Nothing will convince you that Israel is a racist apartheid state held together by hate and violence faster than watching the videos uploaded onto social media by Israelis themselves.



............... Here’s former British Ambassador to Russia Laurie Bristow saying the same thing:
My advice to all young diplomats and analysts [is that] if you want to understand Mr Putin’s foreign policy, listen to what he’s saying. You won’t like it, but you need to understand it, you need to listen to it. The place to start is the Munich speech in 2007.
“Listen to what he says”. It’s quite easy to. Putin has said a lot and most of it appears on the Presidential website in English as well as the original Russian. Never read what the Western reporters say he says – they almost always distort it – read the original. ..........

I have written many times on this site about bad Western intelligence and the unending stream of nonsense spewed in the West about Putin. Indeed, if there is one big theme of my website it’s that the Western view of Russia and Putin is almost completely false.  .......



.................. The Russian leader published a treatise in summer 2021 “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, where he also not only reaffirmed his recognition of Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent state, but also endorsed it. In his words, “You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome! But on what terms?” Simply put, he made peace with the fact that Ukrainians nowadays regard themselves as separate from Russians, but he wants their states to respect each other’s interests.

Therein lies the roots of the current conflict since post-“Maidan” policymakers have consistently done the West’s bidding at Russia’s expense because they owe their power and wealth to the former. That New Cold War bloc envisaged threatening Russia through multidimensional means from Ukraine in order to coerce it into becoming their vassal. If it wasn’t for this grand strategic goal, then everything that led up to Russia’s special operation over the past decade wouldn’t have happened.

Regrettably, Ukraine’s role as the West’s “anti-Russia” was eventually embraced by a growing number of its people, whose identity was reshaped around World War II-era fascist nostalgia as a result of their post-“Maidan” regime’s socio-cultural policies and the past three decades of Western “NGO” work. Reversing this radical revision of Ukrainian identity from its pre-World War I and Soviet-era roots to today’s neo-fascist form is what Russia is referring to when it says that it wants to denazify Ukraine. ......






The $1.5 trillion in military outlays each year is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. 

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money. ........





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