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Sunday, June 2, 2024

2024-06-02

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


Economic and Market Fare:

  • The dynamic interplay between market cycles and structural changes in the global economy impacts everything from investor psychology to corporate profits and overall economic growth.
  • Peter Oppenheimer, the Chief Global Equity Strategist and Head of Macro Research Europe at Goldman Sachs, says that these cycles and changes (which often include moves by governments and central banks) also impact investment strategies, valuations and future returns.
  • What changes are affecting the economic climate right now, and what kind of cycle are we in? Peter shares insights on his new book “Any Happy Returns: Structural Changes and Super Cycles in Markets,” and his take on today’s geopolitical landscape.
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  • Financial cycles repeat and current speculation that “this time is different” is likely incorrect. The gap between perception and reality creates a significant investment opportunity.
  • High yield bonds and small cap stocks typically move in line with each other, but the two have diverged since 2022.
  • We see three plausible explanations for this divergence, all of which imply a more favorable outlook for small cap stocks over high yield bonds and large cap stocks.
There are many historical relationships within financial markets based on sound economic theory, which accordingly repeat cycle after cycle. RBA has for decades studied the consistency of cycles, and profit and economic cycles are a cornerstone of our investment process.

Financial market speculation is largely based on believing history won’t repeat and that the basic tenets of finance and economics don’t apply to a unique situation.  But cycles do repeat or at least resemble each other, and investment opportunity arises when there is a meaningful difference between fundamental reality and speculative perception. 

There seems a very sizable gap between perception and reality in today’s financial markets. Consensus seems to be that we are experiencing a unique stock market cycle (perhaps fueled by artificial intelligence), yet financial history suggests that is highly unlikely to be true. 

The magnitude of the current markets’ atypical behavior makes it unusually important to consider potential outcomes. In particular, the bond market seems to be suggesting broad economic and profits health, whereas the equity market seem to be forecasting a depression or at least a steep economic decline. ..........




Negative categories all at highest levels since bank expanded in trucking lending in 2015



Bubble Fare:


............................. As I noted in late-2021, there are certain features of valuation, investor psychology, and price behavior that tend to emerge when the fear of missing out becomes particularly extreme and the focus of speculation becomes particularly narrow. Last Friday, we hit a fresh “motherlode” of these conditions. Since the mid-1980’s, I’ve developed and collected scores of interesting syndromes and relationships that help to gauge overextended conditions, in both directions. I’ll occasionally add, discard, or tweak one or two, but for the most part, I’ve used the same set for years. The most important change in 2021 was to require deterioration in our gauge of market internals, regardless of how overextended conditions might be otherwise.

We keep the specifics of market internals and many technical measures proprietary, but we’re very open about the general features. A red flag is typically some combination of: overextended valuations and price/volume behavior; lopsided sentiment or speculative positioning; and divergence among individual stocks, industries, sectors, or security-types such bonds or lower-grade credit. .........

The chart below shows our most reliable valuation measure: the ratio of nonfinancial market capitalization to corporate gross-value added, including estimated foreign revenues. The present level exceeds the 1929 and 2000 extremes, and indeed every point in U.S. history except those closely surrounding the early 2022 peak. Even the more conventional (but less reliable) S&P 500 price/forward operating earnings multiple is at levels that have no rivals except surrounding the 2000 and 2022 peaks. Put simply, my impression is that the period since early-2022 comprises the extended peak of one of the three great speculative bubbles in U.S. history. ..............

Since 2000, investors have squeezed more return from 4.3% revenue growth plus 1.9% dividends only by driving the price/revenue multiple to record extremes. Now move valuations the other direction, and the retreat in valuations acts as a subtraction to long-term returns. The math is the same for any other valuation multiple you prefer. It’s just noisier for fundamentals like earnings, .........

If total S&P 500 revenues and U.S. GDP have averaged real annual growth of less than 2.5% annually for the past 30 years, even with the benefit of all that innovation (they have), and one can demonstrate that the increase in corporate profit margins during that period is largely tied to lower interest costs (one can), it is a mistake to value the entire market at record multiples just because some of the companies enjoy network effects that give them the ability to hoard market share. The cash flows are just concentrated in fewer hands ...........


Just four giant technology stocks added more market value than the rest of the S&P 500 put together this month. More than half of the gain came from Nvidia.



Vid Fare:






Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Getting a grip on energy, materials and civilisation




..... A Volvo study in 2021 revealed that the manufacture and operation of an electric vehicle generates approximately 70% more emissions than its ICE (internal combustion engine) counterpart. The increased emissions are primarily due to the energy-intensive production of batteries and the use of materials like aluminum, which have high production emissions. Assuming that an average car in America is driven 10,000 per year, it takes about seven years before an EV’s net emissions are less than those from an ICE car. Volvo’s and a similar study by Volkswagon tested EVs with small batteries whose driving range averaged only 175 miles.

The EVs selling in America today have 300-400 mile ranges and much larger, heavier batteries. They will take about ten years to emit fewer emissions than an ICE car. Few Americans keep a car that long so EVs will probably never result in lower emissions. .......



................. All the expertise and modern technology we possess will not be coming to save us; there is no techno-fix or deus ex machina remotely scalable to the planetary crises we face. Emergency atmospheric geoengineering schemes won’t save us at this point. Can’t we just suck the 900 billion tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere that we have spewed since the beginning of the industrial revolution? No. It bears repeating that the spiking Keeling curve is non-reversible on human timescales.

“We sadly continue to break records in the CO2 rise rate,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 program at Scripps. “The ultimate reason is continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.” ~ May 8, 2024

The rate of ocean warming has nearly quadrupled since the late twentieth century, doubling since 1993. In the last twelve month, ocean heating has been on a tear, shattering records consistently. The world is currently undergoing the fourth global coral bleaching event on record, the second in the last decade, and the Great Barrier Reef is suffering its worst bleaching event in recorded history. This year’s hurricane season will likely be a record-breaker. The oceans are starting to release all that thermal energy we have been unceremoniously dumping into them. At one time, oceans seemed like an endless sink for the emissions from humanity’s nonstop consumption of fossil fuels, but that appears to be coming to an end. The world’s rivers are warming and losing oxygen even faster than the oceans. In contrast to those grim stats, humanity is set to consume more resources in the next 30 years as we have since the dawn of civilization. We have already consumed the future and are now, as they say, eating the seed corn.

We have breached tipping points and set in motion positive feedback loops that are accelerating non-linear ecological changes. Six of nine major planetary boundaries have been broken. Our unintended and haphazard experiment with complex Earth systems will unleash a Pandora’s box of deadly consequences. ...............

........ After studying our ecological overshoot for several decades, I have some observations that must be accepted as fact:
  • “Renewable” energy is not displacing our massive fossil fuel consumption at all, but only serving as a small addition to the total global energy consumption.
  • “Renewable” or alternative energy, such as solar and wind, is dependent on fossil fuels for its manufacture, installation, maintenance, and eventual disposal.
  •  The so-called “Energy Transition” away from fossil fuels is pure techno-hopium and will never materialize.
  • The general public and many scientists don’t understand the math and physics involved in transitioning a $100 trillion global economy, dependent on hydrocarbons, to intermittent alternative energy sources.
  • No such “Energy Transition” can be accomplished without radical reductions in resource consumption. This is antithetical to the basic biological urge for expansion by most organisms, including humans, and current trends illustrate this behavior. We also keep finding more ways to consume evermore energy. On top of this, the World Bank is urging faster economic growth for emerging economies in order for them to repay mounting debts.
  • Governments are ill-equipped to deal with industrial civilization’s complex polycrisis because effective solutions would undermine economic growth.
The latest deadline to ‘save the planet’ is now two years from now, according to a UN Climate Change official. No doubt another arbitrary date given to justify someone’s job and department budget. According to Global Footprint Network’s calculations, humans have been in overshoot for over half a century. Others would say that we have been in overshoot since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, surviving only by mining the Earth’s soils. Like fossil fuels, the vast nutrient store of soils represents a unique one-time gift that has been squandered by agricultural erosion. Without petroleum and arable soils, the Earth will only support perhaps 5% of the present global population, as it did before the advent of agriculture. Considering that we are being constantly blindsided by faster-than-normal and worse-than-expected findings from scientists, I suspect there are far less food harvests left for us than we think. ........



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Abstract
Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities and climate change. In the present paper, we have examined this more deeply, and explore the behavioral drivers of overshoot, providing evidence that overshoot is itself a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behavior. We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioral Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot. We demonstrate how current interventions are largely physical, resource intensive, slow-moving and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (such as climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive behaviors). We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress. We explore three drivers of the behavioral crisis in depth: economic growth; marketing; and pronatalism. These three drivers directly impact the three ‘levers’ of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. We demonstrate how the maladaptive behaviors of overshoot stemming from these three drivers have been catalysed and perpetuated by the intentional exploitation of previously adaptive human impulses. In the final sections of this paper, we propose an interdisciplinary emergency response to the behavioral crisis by, amongst other things, the shifting of social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste. We seek to highlight a critical disconnect that is an ongoing societal gulf in communication between those that know such as scientists working within limits to growth, and those members of the citizenry, largely influenced by social scientists and industry, that must act.
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................................. Civilization is, to us, the bees' knees, but to the birds and the bees it's just a kick in the nuts. GDP is—to most lifeforms—just a measure of exponentially increasing garbage. Most consumer goods are binned within a year, and 99.999% are binned within a lifetime. 100% are useless to animals immediately, and generally toxic or indigestible. All the land and water use is land and water taken away from more productive uses, like the reproduction of life. We just produce death and call it progress. It's just numbers in the sky.

The solution to climate change is actually simple, as Binocs and Tree imply, but we like complexity. When we say 'save the earth' it's disingenuous, we really mean save ourselves. So we build machines to reverse climate change, like raping to restore virginity. Or we switch to electric cars, like switching from heroin to fentanyl. We are trying to solve a problem with different problems. Literally doing nothing is the best thing we could do, but we overcomplicate things with classic overconfidence. ................

So someday the cigarettes will be stubbed out. Not because industrial civilization gave up, but because it just died of lung cancer and literally ran out of gas at about the same time. Some day the planetary lungs will heal, turning all that CO₂ into O₂, over millions of years. This isn't even the first time that lifeforms completely fucked the climate (the Great Oxygen Holocaust, never forget). There is nothing new under the sun, we just dug up old photosynthetic lifeforms as 'fossils' and ran their energetic cycle in reverse. Whereas they once cooled the Earth to the equator with too much oxygen, we're roasting it to the poles with too much carbon.



Geopolitical Fare:



********** The US Empire Isn't A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars, It's A Nonstop War That Runs A Government

It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.

The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof. 

This campaign is not waged to benefit the American people or their security, but to benefit the loose international alliance of plutocrats and unelected empire managers whose wealth and power are premised on the world order of continuous violence, exploitation and extraction which the campaign of global domination upholds. This campaign of global domination and its manifestations as a whole may be referred to as the US empire, which has very little in common with the US as an individual nation. .........



........................ The preparation for war is war.  What is prepared must be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, and on and on until one day no one is left to use anything, for the world will be used up in a nuclear conflagration.  These weapons are produced in nice clean factories that pay good wages to people who take their pay and go their way, giving their souls to the killers.  For the U.S. economy is built on the waging of wars so continuous that it is nearly impossible to find a break between its hot and cold phases, or what seems like decent employment and the diabolic.  They are so intertwined.  It is a system of capitalistic finance, a revolutionary system that builds to destroy.

The U.S spends nearly $900  billion dollars annually on “defense” spending; this is more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan combined.  The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that.  And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their insouciance and silence.  That their country is spending up to 2 trillion dollars on modernizing its nuclear weapons disturbs them  not.  It is a death cult. ..................

Michel Chossudovsky, Ray McGovern, Eva Bartlett, Craig Murray, Patrick Lawrence, Vanessa Beeley, Pepe Escobar, Oliver Stone, Andrew Napolitano, Craig Paul Roberts, Chris Hedges, Alastair Crooke, Caitlin Johnstone, Peter Koenig, Finian Cunningham, Diana Johnstone, Lew Rockwell, and so many other sane but marginalized writers whose names I am omitting as I write quickly, are warning us of our closeness to nuclear annihilation.  Cassandras all, I fear.  Marginalized prophets such as writer and antinuclear activist James W. Douglass (Lightning East to West, JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) have been issuing such warnings for decades.  It is understandable that so many turn away from such warnings, for the thought of a nuclear war induces deep anxiety hard to control.  But unless the vast majority can break through such reticence and see through the official propaganda, the world will be destroyed by madmen sooner or later.  The signs today all point to sooner, for we are on the edge of the abyss. ...................



A lot of mainstream-adjacent progressives act like Gaza is some radical deviation from normal US behavior, which is infantile nonsense. The US inflicts similar horrors on the world all the time; the only major difference is (A) this one’s being live-streamed and (B) there was a pro-Palestine movement in place before it began.

With regard to (B), Gaza is really illustrating how much the US empire benefits from moving through its foreign military violence relatively quickly. When it can move from propagandizing the population about Evil Dictatorship X to destroying the country in question to moving on to its next war in the span of a few short years, there’s not enough time for public awareness to grow of exactly how evil the empire is being. It was years before a mainstream consensus developed that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, and it will probably be decades before there’s mainstream consensus about the evil shit the empire did in Syria from 2011 onwards.

With Gaza, people saw this one coming and were calling it what it is from the moment it began, because there was already a widespread political understanding — at least on the left — that Israel is a murderous settler-colonialist project and that the Palestinians are a colonized people. This widespread understanding occurred because the Israel-Palestine debate has been raging for generations, so the collective has had enough time to really examine the facts and circulate its arguments through public consciousness. Those facts and arguments were there ready to be picked up and understood and used — even by young people who are new to the situation — after October 7.

So what’s really hurting the empire’s information interests today is the fact that there was widespread social consciousness about Palestine already in place before the Gaza assault began, combined with the consciousness-expanding effects of social media and the ease with which ordinary people can now circulate raw video footage. Which really goes to illustrate the fact that consciousness and dysfunction cannot coexist, whether you’re talking about humans as individuals or as a collective. If we can really see something and deeply understand it, it’s much harder for depravity to function.

The light of awareness makes it very difficult for an empire which is fueled by human blood to operate, which is why so much effort has been going into shutting off the lights. Shutting off the lights here looks like circulating lies and propaganda, killing Palestinian journalists in record numbers, blocking western journalists from entering Gaza, banning TikTok, stomping out student protests, and smearing everyone who tries to spread awareness of Gaza as an anti-semite. ........


NATO's Yipping Chihuahuas Strain Their Leash as Russia Gears Up for Next Wave

........... This is lurid absurdity and tragicomedy in one. How abjectly brainwashed and brainless does one’s populace have to be to truly believe Russia seeks to invade those worthless islands belonging to two insignificant countries?

........ The hysteria continues apace with the corporate deepstate mill churning out one fake after another to propagandize European chattel into total fear and obedience into accepting the corporo-banking cabal’s need for global war



Having accepted that the mainstream media is failing to perform its primary duty to be timely and objectively informative, greater numbers are turning to alternative news personalities. This is certainly true in this time of war when discerning what is true from what others would prefer you to believe can be overwhelming. Dopamine-inducing propaganda is an omnipresent feature of modern media, and emotions stirred by military conflict only increase the difficulty of separating reality from the innumerable synthetic varieties. It is not uncommon to find wildly different descriptions of the same event from seemingly credible sources.

............. The ability to assess the bias of an information source, buttress it with independently gathered facts, and draw conclusions based on the totality of the data are important skills for any analyst to learn



Joe Biden has killed (at least) twice as many people as Trump from COVID, while cutting all relief funds and just telling people to go back to work sick. But liberal Democrats don't give a shit because it's their guy doing it. In the same way, Biden has continued caging children at the border, continued the trade war with China, and started all the wars they said Trump was going to start. And liberal Democrats don't give a shit. These people will really support a genocide as long as it's branded blue. Americans truly are cattle in cattle cars, driven by foxes and wolves, in the most genocidal version of the trolley problem.

The Trolley Problem
Liberal Democracy™ is a version of the trolley problem where 'pulling the lever changes the color of the trolley from blue to red.' That's it. The trolley runs over people no matter how hard people vote. There's a lot of debate about what sex acts to perform inside the trolley, but running over peasants is a constant.

Liberal Democrats are actually the worst. While Republicans are transparently evil, Democrats actually believe their own bullshit. People like Samantha Powers will write books about genocide and then commit one. Secretary of State will play 'Keep On Rocking In The Free World' in Ukraine, while an unelected President press gangs all the men into slaughter. Stephen Colbert and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez will mutually masturbate about how 'empathetic' Joe Biden is, while he massacres children every day. Liberal Democrats might do bad, but they feel bad, which makes it all good, apparently. As the sage eyeballslicer said, “A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now.” Truly sage advice from a rando. ...................

The Property Party
It all comes down to money for a minority, which is really the founding principle of America. The American revolution was just a bunch of slave holding white guys that didn't want to pay taxes. That's it. Everything else was marketing. It was never about 'the people', that was just a tagline to sell the thing. At founding a fraction of inhabitants could vote—property-owning white men—which is how the system still works to this day. It's working exactly as intended. .......

Everything Americans call Democracy™ (and try to export via bombs) is just a reality TV show atop rank oligarchy. They have these grand public bribery festivals called 'elections' where they vote on different paint job for the same snow job, and they call this freedom .........

'Israel' is doing exactly what it's supposed to, while giving America plausible deniability. This is, in fact, the trolley company's favorite business model, dropping expensive bombs on poor people without air defenses. After the embarrassment of getting caned in Ukraine, Palestine is back to business as usual.

In truth this is what White Empire's rulers—that writhing cybernetic mass of carnivorous corporations and a craven comprador class—has decided will be normal. The cruelty we see in Gaza is, in fact, the point.  ............

Biden, unlike Trump, spouts what Hannah Arendt called 'pious banalities' while doing the same or worse actual evil. He pretends to feel bad or have good reasons while doing total evil, and that's sadly enough for enough people ........

The big question for the American heirs to German hypocrisy is what they will do if/when the trolley changes colors this November. Will they suddenly be offended at what they supported, ignored, or both-sidesed before? Will they oppose a Trump genocide just as they opposed a Trump pandemic? Because that guy is doing it, and committing the ultimate sin of embarrassing liberals? Will they co-opt the protests they previously derided or elided, turning the student slogans into pompous lawn signs like they did with BLM? .........



.................. The third layer is the shallow state. It consists of legacy media outlets such as CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, in addition to social media companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, as well as common internet tools like Google and Wikipedia. It includes military contractors and tax-supported academia as well.

These are all captured institutions, with revolving doors with the deep and middle states. The reporters at these large media outfits have close relationships with the top bureaucrats at the agencies they cover, which is why the agencies themselves are rarely investigated closely. .............

The relationship between the three layers is perfectly illustrated in the way pharmaceutical companies work. They do the bidding of the deep state with biodefense work that is classified, making both pathogens and antidotes. They work with the middle state, with board members and managers of companies going back and forth with the NIH and FDA, sharing royalties on new patented consumer products. The companies then dominate advertising on all the main media venues, which means that the media covers up for them at every turn and echoes deep and middle state priorities.

If you are seeking to set up and manage a 21st-century technocratic regime, the ideal mechanism of compulsion and coercion is centered in the shallow state, because it is private, consumer-facing, and trusted more than any other layers of the state. Every form of coercion can be “market washed” as if these are purely private actions taking place. The strategic objective of any really good plan for hegemony, then, is to push the agenda from the deep state, through the middle state, and land in the shallow state for distribution to the public. ............



Historical Fare:


For the Chinese, the trauma of the Century of Humiliation continues as a blunt reminder of their past defeat and neo-colonial servitude, as well as a reminder of the West’s self-righteous hypocrisy and arrogance. 

In 1500, India and China were the world’s most advanced civilizations. Then came the Europeans. They eventually looted and wreaked havoc on both, just as they were to on the Americas and Africa. ..............

............... The British crown had the distinction of being the biggest Opium smuggler in history—a central factor in their wrecking Chinese and Indian civilizations.

World Opium production by 1995 was down to 4,200 metric tons (4,630 tons), mostly from Burma and Afghanistan. The Taliban banned it in 2000, and production fell from 3400 to only 204 tons. The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan reversed this, and by 2008, U.S. occupied Afghanistan was producing 90% of the world’s Opium, reaching 10,000 tons in 2017. After the U.S. was driven out in 2021, the Taliban quickly stopped Opium production. The United States Institute of Peace, possibly revealing U.S. support for narco-trafficking, pronounced, “the Taliban’s successful Opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world” and “will have negative economic and humanitarian consequences.” ..............



Sci Fare:




A recurrent theme in the books that I review is that we underestimate what other animals are capable of and, by extension, overestimate humans. One thrust of Biocivilisations is that many of the hallmarks of human civilisations have parallels in the worlds of plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. Less of a popular science book that marvels at life’s achievements, this is more a full-throated attack on reductive materialism and mainstream biology that leans on philosophy, metaphor, and a substantial dose of unconventional ideas. In turns fascinating and frustrating, there is a lot to unpack here. ......



Other Fare:

Crawford: AI as self-erasure
Western man’s will to disappear is getting installed in the omni-operating system

Elevated “deaths of despair” and declining birth rates in the West must be due to an array of factors, hard to tease apart. My hunch is that one of them is what the sociologist Richard Sennett called “the specter of uselessness.” He meant feeling redundant at work. But there is a deeper, existential version of this that may arise when the world feels already-occupied, so there is no place for you to grow into and make your own.

In the normal course of human society, you are born into a culture that has prepared the way for you. It initiates you into its language and tells a story of where you came from. It is saturated with meaning due to a chain of begettings that reaches back in time, each generation of which started and grew through acts of love: at conception, and in the ongoing work of teaching, transmission and care. The world is welcoming, in other words. It was built by your ancestors, and they imagined you long before you arrived. They wondered what sort of work you might do, before you knew there is such a thing as work ......


The fate of Empires is to inevitably collapse. Right now, we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to reverse that cyclical decline and create institutions which benefit all of us.

For the most part, I predicted the course of the pandemic as I assumed a playbook similar to the one Anthony Fauci used during the AIDS crisis would be inflicted upon America, and I assumed that like many disastrous experimental “emergency” vaccines of the past, the mRNA injections would have a lot of problems. Nonetheless as I watched the pandemic unfold, I was left with a more and more nagging question—why are they going this far? It’s virtually guaranteed that what’s been done will provoke a massive backlash which will break a lot of the trust in our medical authorities that the medical industry relies upon (which was cemented upon the public through a massive investment over the last century).

Over the last few months, we’ve in turn began to see more and more signs this widespread loss of trust is emerging, which in turn has caused me to reflect upon the unique moment we are in and how COVID-19 both illustrates the decline of the American Empire and an unprecedented opportunity to at last resolve a centuries old debacle.

The Cyclical Nature of History
One’s interpretation (and feeling towards) the series of events that unfolds in front of them is largely dependent upon the perspective they see reality through. For example, in previous articles, I’ve tried to show how the subconscious biases people carry will cause them to develop cognitive filters which only allow them to see the aspects of reality which conform to those biases (which for example is why so many otherwise intelligent people genuinely believe all vaccines are “safe and effective”). Likewise, there are people who “only see what’s in front of them” whereas there are others who “see the forest through the trees,” and a radically different reality emerges depending on which view one holds. ..............................

....... Because of the cyclical nature of this process, it can become immensely frustrating to dedicate your life to trying to wake humanity up only to see all of your critically important work go nowhere, and I know of many who spent their lives advocating for the health of humanity and by the end were broken inside because no one wanted to listen to them. .................

The Limits of Propaganda
As a lifelong student of propaganda, I recognize how powerful it is and how it often it can cause people to be compelled to act directly against their own interests in a manner you would never imagine was possible (e.g., consider what we all witnessed throughout the COVID-19 vaccination campaign). Nonetheless, while propaganda is immensely powerful (and continually evolving as the technology behind it advances) there are still limits as to what it can do and a point can be reached where no amount of propaganda can prevent the public from revolting against a bad policy.

Typically, since propaganda props up a lie, for it to “win” it must have significantly more force behind it than the truth it is opposing. In turn, two things can shift the balance against the propaganda’s narrative—its narrative being at such odds with reality that a gargantuan amount of force is required to maintain it, or those on the other side gaining the power to promote a competing narrative ....................

The Seven Stages of Empires
In 1978, Sir John Glubb, a British General and awake historian published his study of many empires throughout history. Arguing that most historians follow a biased interpretation of history (which only focuses on the parts they want to glamorize) he instead attempted to present what was shown when a complete picture was taken which did not selectively filter out parts of the story.

From it, he discovered that all 11 of the Empires he studied (those within the Western World and the Middle East between 869 B.C. to 1950 A.D.), regardless of the culture, era or technology followed a remarkably similar pattern: the empire lasted for approximately 250 years (ranging from 207 to 267 years), and each went through 7 successive stages (which approximated 10 generations being born within the Empire).

Given the peculiarity of this pattern, it led him to believe this process was something intrinsic to the human psyche, and perhaps was God’s way of ensuring humanity would continually evolve, as each empire coming to prominence allowed its most beneficial ideas to be adopted throughout the world before it was then supplanted by the next empire which could likewise spread its ideas through the world.

The seven stages he identified were as follows:
  • The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
  • The Age of Conquests
  • The Age of Commerce
  • The Age of Affluence
  • The Age of Intellect
  • The Age of Decadence.
  • The Age of Collapse
....................
.......... Unlike many, I hence was not surprised by the FDA’s outrageous conduct with the COVID-19 vaccines as it simply represented the next escalation of a process I had seen happen again and again with other drugs (e.g., I previously detailed the horrendous scandal that transpired with the SSRI antidepressants and what happened with the HPV vaccine). Instead, I was hopeful the COVID-19 vaccine debacle would be such a shock to the public it would begin waking them up to the fact something needed to be done about our increasingly comprised public health agencies. ............


This one article should be preserved for eternity so that our grandchildren’s grandchildren can read about the time the world fell into mass hysteria.

Perhaps the myths wouldn’t go away because the truth doesn’t disappear, however hard you try to hide it. ..........



Given the lack of herd immunity and the ongoing evolution of the virus towards enhanced transmissibility, combined with the fact that there is absolutely no scientific rationale to believe that updated C-19 vaccines will protect highly vaccinated populations that, by now, have experienced multiple rounds of vaccine breakthrough infections, citizens should pressure their governments to immediately ensure the availability of safe and effective antiviral drugs in sufficient supply and at affordable prices.

Ironically, this means that governments in highly C-19 vaccinated countries should ideally mandate the use of ivermectin and/or hydroxychloroquine to mitigate the detrimental consequences of their insane C-19 vaccine mandates.



QOTW:

Radagast: The ecosystems, the animals in the farms, I’ve talked about these things many times before. But once you see these things, you just can’t unsee them. This is why I take a lot of cannabis, to help me look away from it all. It’s a kind of childish innocence you lose, just layers upon layers of conditioning in your brain, that you have to remove to see reality. When you see reality, it’s terrifying, but you can’t be free without seeing it.



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