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Thursday, August 1, 2024

2024-08-01

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Roberts: The Fed Fails



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But now, some are asking whether the Fed might be a little too data dependent. Macquarie strategist and Odd Lots repeat guest Viktor Shvets brought the idea up back in May.
As he put it on the podcast:

“… Essentially we have is a Federal Reserve [that] is a prisoner of policies they started putting in a couple of years ago, which is essentially being extremely data dependent rather than forward-looking … And if you become data dependent, you starting to create exceptional volatility because you’re basically like a deer in the light, you are stuck, you cannot move to the left, you cannot move to the right.”


At the heart of these revisions is a horribly flawed birth-death model used by the BLS. My calculation closely matches an estimate by Bloomberg’s chief Economist.

BED Notes
  • BED stands for Business Employment Dynamics. It is based on reporting of about 9.1 million private-sector businesses making it very accurate.
  • The BED report provides an accurate count of job creation by new businesses, and job losses by businesses going out of business.
  • BED is a large subset of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages QCEW which covers 11.6 million businesses
  • The problem with BED is timeliness. On July 24, the BLS just released BED data for the fourth quarter of 2023 (Oct, Nov, Dec).
  • October to July is a 9 month wait. QCEW data has an even bigger lag.
Birth-Death Notes
  • In order to get around the huge time lag of BEDs, the BLS uses a Birth-Death Model to estimate net job creation by new businesses and businesses going out of business.
  • The BLS explains “The net birth-death forecasts are not seasonally adjusted, and are applied to the not seasonally adjusted monthly employment estimates to derive the final CES employment estimates.”
  • CES stands for (Current Employment Statistics). It’s part of the monthly jobs report.
  • The BLS does not calculate and does not know how many jobs the Birth-Death model adds or subtracts (to or from) the monthly jobs report.
CES Notes
  • CES, the monthly jobs report is based on about 670,000 businesses vs 9.1 million for BED and 11.6 million for QCEW.
  • CES does not have timely data about business openings or closings so the BLS uses a birth-death model to estimate.
  • Every month in my synopsis of the jobs reports I state “Do not subtract the reported Birth-Death number from the reported headline number. That approach is statistically invalid and wildly inaccurate.” Yet every month I see people doing that calculation.
Synopsis!

In normal times, not entering into recession or out of recession, the birth-death model is subject to mostly random fluctuations.

The monthly jobs reports are not very accurate, but errors generally balance out over time.

It’s another matter near recessions and the last one was one for the record books.

It’s important to note that BED and the Birth-Death model numbers are both by the BLS and are supposed to measure the same thing (net new job creation or losses by businesses).

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Jobs are from the CES monthly survey, discussed above. Employment and unemployment are from a separate BLS Household Survey.

The discrepancy is massive. But BED and QCEW confirm which one is accurate.

Yet, every month, economists go gaga over garbage headline jobs numbers...............







........................................................ There is no evidence currently of an exogenous event that would “derail” the financial markets. Credit spreads, as shown, remain significantly suppressed, and economic data, while weakening, is not recessionary.

So far, the current correction, which has recently worried investors and the media, remains an expected and rather ordinary correction within a bullish year. .............





Waiting until September unnecessarily increases the risk of a recession.




July 2024 Update

Corporate bond market functioning appears healthy. The end-of-month market-level CMDI is below its historical 10th percentile.



Underfunded plans have little alternative but to allocate to an investment with a history of beating public equities.


At the same time, “the interest rate spike has raised the stakes of holding an asset longer,” says Bain & Co.






  • Firms want to kick the can on assets that need more time
  • Financial engineering of continuation funds is a hard sell


Complex layers of leverage could pose a threat to the global economy




The coming commercial real estate crisis of U.S. banks




Tweets of the Week:
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Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


Abstract
In September 2020 Deutsche Bank published a report entitled “The Age of Disorder.” Fronted dramatically by the image of a volcano and volley of lightning across a brooding sky, the report warned that the global economy was on the precipice of a phase shift from neo-liberal quasi-stability to an era characterized by dramatic social, economic, and ecological upheavals. Deutsche Bank’s researchers call this new period “the age of disorder”. This paper proposes Deutsche Bank’s appraisal is part of a broader condition that it calls capitalist catastrophism and an emerging regime of eco-apartheid. Taking as its point of departure Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s call for geographers to construct concepts that might help navigate a hotter planet, the paper introduces capitalist catastrophism as a concept that names and theorizes the effects of a dramatic and asymmetrically catastrophic reconfiguration of the capitalist world-system. Capitalist catastrophism has three characteristics. First, a newfound ability for social movements and theorists to imagine post-capitalist futures combined with an inability to realize them. Second, cascading and mutually amplifying social and ecological crises that outrun the capacities of states and capital to contain them. Third, an unevenly distributed cancellation of human and non-human futures. Drawing on Marxist political economy and Nyasha Mboti’s theorization of apartheid, the paper concludes that capitalist catastrophism is resolving itself into a global system of eco-apartheid in which a green transition for some is secured by putting the exploited and oppressed majority in harm’s way.



........... Using our new range of pCO2 values, we calculate average Earth system sensitivity and equilibrium climate sensitivity, resulting in 13.9 °C and 7.2 °C per doubling of pCO2, respectively. These values are significantly higher than IPCC global warming estimations, consistent or higher than some recent state-of-the-art climate models, and consistent with other proxy-based estimates.




A gigantic, weather-defining current system could be headed to collapse. Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen had a simple yet controversial question: How much time might we have left to save it?






A "Short Take" on the next 5-7 years.







Every economy which fails to manage its growth eventually destroys itself. Humanity has embraced continuous expansion, a concept no different than cancer.

Pausing or stopping growth altogether is essential for all living organisms – and this is why every single species on this planet comes with genes that are dedicated to managing growth. Degrowth is an ancient natural process older than humanity itself: so incredibly essential to life that no living organism can exist without it. As this civilisation runs out of road, the hints and reminders of how degrowth can save us are everywhere, if we only woke up from the glycemic coma of our economic diabetes. ............................

.............. The problem with growth is that it has become dogmatic, supported by centuries of religious, colonialist and consumatronic propaganda. It is time we begin tearing down the biggest misinformation campaign which has been at the center of our civilisational lie: growth. Apoptosis is part of the natural life cycle of every living being on Earth: from tulips that crawl back into their bulbs each year, to tumbleweeds who die just at the right time to be picked up by the wind and disperse their seeds throughout the desert, to a banana that turns brown. It is time we begin to pay attention to these life forms that appear to be orders of magnitude smarter than us





GeoPolitical Fare:


....................... Biden will end his days assuming, as he does here, that he can utter the most preposterous bunkum, contradictory to perfectly visible realities, and it will be accepted as true because he has said it. The Man from Scranton, authenticity beyond his reach and ordinary honesty foreign to his repertoire, got away with this chicanery for decades while he served in the Senate. 

But the White House has simply defeated him. A lightweight when it came time to prove himself as a statesman and a leader, he never should have walked its halls as anything other than a visitor.  

Of the many large truths worth noting about the Biden presidency, the most important in my judgment is that he has turned, error upon error, misjudgment upon misjudgment, stupidity upon stupidity, a gradual but long-evident erosion in American power, prestige and reputation into a precipitous collapse. There are a few things to say about this straightaway.  

One, the decline over which Biden has presided was inevitable. Biden accelerated the deterioration of America’s power and standing — “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” as Barack Obama once said of him — but he is not altogether to be blamed.

The American imperium, a century and a quarter, or eight decades old, depending on how one dates its emergence, was from the first destined to crumble, and it is the lot of those living to witness this fate as it unfolds. This is the reality of our time. No one who achieves the White House will ever repudiate the empire, and no one serving as president can salvage it, either.  

Two, America will never climb out of the depths to which Biden has led America. The great varieties of damage he has done are irreversible. This is as true at home as it is on the foreign side. There is no building back better, just as there is no making America great again. Let us not waste our time with this kind of thinking. Let us leave all that to the nostalgists. There is only building anew. 

Finally, and related to the above point, it is important to view the imperium’s collapse positively. Failure — many failures — will be necessary before it becomes possible to begin realizing a post-imperial, post-exceptionalist America dedicated, at last, to the human cause. ............



Americans have just passed through the most eventful and tumultuous four weeks in memory.

The only comparisons are 9/11, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Watergate/Vietnam days of the 1970s, the riots and assassinations in the 1960s and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

First, we had Joe Biden’s face-plant debate performance on June 27 when he looked like a corpse and spoke in a demented way.

Then came the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania (which killed one and wounded two others).

This was followed by the Republican National Convention and nomination of J.D. Vance on July 15, the decision of Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race on July 21 and finally the coronation of Queen Kamala Harris in the following days (more on Harris below).

Any one of these stories would be huge news in any election cycle, but to have five such events in less than four weeks is a lot to process, let alone fully comprehend. ............



What a stupendously stupid month it has been.

As time marches on and we memory-hole July 2024, we will lie to ourselves and pretend that everything that happened was a fringe thing. We’re still in the moment, at least for now, so we can tell the truth. None of this was fringe. A lot of liberals convinced themselves very quickly and actively promoted the view that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was staged. A lot of conservatives convinced themselves that Joe Biden was on his deathbed. Maybe he was already dead.

It is over a week later now, and MSNBC is still hosting breathless segments on whether it was a bullet or a shard of glass or shrapnel that sliced the ear of the former president. Forensically interesting, I suppose. Maybe it was shrapnel! But it’s only really relevant for continued discussion if you suspect or would rather like people to speculate that it might be evidence of a staged or exaggerated attack. And many suspected exactly that. More than a third of Democrats, which is a bit more than the popularity of Q-Anon theories among Republicans. If you happened to push back ever so lightly on the idea that there is any evidence of a staged assassination, the responses you would have received were where things really started to go off the rails ...........

Meanwhile, mainstream conservatives continue to do their best Columbo routines, zooming in on President Biden’s watch as if it were a new damned Zapruder film, all to conjure explanations for why the White House might be lying about how live his address to the nation really was. If you didn’t learn your lesson the first time and pushed back just as lightly on the notion that there’s any evidence of Biden being in hospice care or literally dead, you’d have been struck once again by non sequitur responses ...............


Viktor Orbán on how the war has revealed the reality of the world today

This past weekend saw the delivery of what can easily be described as the most important geopolitical speech of the decade — though you’re likely to have missed it if you tend to get your news from the Western mainstream media. The reason for the media silence is easy to explain: first, it was given by Viktor Orbán, the number one enemy of the European establishment; second, the speech itself — an analysis of the state of the world, and of the West and Europe in particular — is probably the most powerful takedown yet of the dominant Western geopolitical and cultural paradigm.

It’s a masterful talk, in which Orbán covers a wide range of topics: the war in Ukraine, Europe-US relations, the demise of Western hegemony and the southward and eastward global geopolitical shift underway, the importance of the nation state, the European Union (EU) as the quintessential example of the globalist and oligarchic shift in Western politics, Donald Trump, Hungary’s role in all this, and much more.

It’s a very long speech, which is why I’ve selected what I consider to be its most important takeaways (edited for clarity), focusing on the issues of European and global relevance rather than the ones more strictly related to Hungary. It still makes for a pretty long read, but one that’s definitely worth your time. ...............................................................









................................. In fact, there is a strong argument that people without children are far more likely to prioritize the wellbeing of the residents of their country than those with children: they don’t have to make a choice: “should I make my kids better off OR the everyone else better off?”


Scahill: Can Kamala Harris Wipe the Blood Off Her Hands?
While the likely Democratic nominee does not have Joe Biden’s 50-year history of support for Israeli militarism, her record indicates she would maintain a staunch pro-Israel policy.



Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress was everything you’d expect: packed full of lies and propaganda spin, yet simultaneously very illuminating and revealing.

The Israeli prime minister received no fewer than 58 standing ovations while speaking before both houses of Congress and spewing the most despicable lies you could possibly imagine in his conspicuously American accent. Depending on how politically aware you are, this spectacle could be perceived as either deeply un-American, or as American as it gets.

Netanyahu repeated evidence-free atrocity propaganda about what happened on October 7, falsely asserting that Hamas “burned babies alive” and killed two babies in an attic. He falsely claimed that Hamas “butchered 1,200 people”, pretending it’s not a well-established fact that many of the 1,139 Israeli deaths that day came from both indiscriminate IDF fire and deliberate targeting in implementation of the Hannibal Directive. ................

You couldn’t ask for a better example of everything Washington stands for than this. Both houses of Congress rising to feverishly applaud one of history’s worst genocidal monsters dozens of times as he lies over and over again is a much better representation of what the US government is about than anything you’ll see during the presidential race from now until November.

This is everything Israel is, and this is everything the US empire is. They’re showing you who they are. Believe them.


Lawrence: No More Silence
If Zionist ideology ever fit into the modern world, and I will leave this an outstanding question, it no longer does.

I  do not know how it is in your household, but in mine we have developed the practice over the past nine months of reciting to one another the most appalling of the news bulletins from Gaza that come our way from a great variety of sources. It is rather miserable to think life has come to this, reading aloud daily accounts of atrocities, but there is no turning away from the depths to which terrorist Israel has dragged the whole of humanity.

The subtext of each of these recitations is, “Can you believe this is happening? Can you believe the U.S. participates in this? Can you believe this is normalized?”

It is indeed difficult to believe the things we read of are part of life in the third decade of the 21st century, and may this remain so: ...............



................. 
❖

They lied about mass rapes so that they could systemically rape. 

They lied about beheaded babies so that they could kill babies. 

They lied about “human shields” to shield themselves while killing civilians. 

They lied about being victims so that they could victimize others.

❖

Meanwhile the US is disputing the election results in Venezuela again because they didn’t get the result they want, with more sanctions and other interventionism likely on the way for the empire-targeted nation.

It’s so wild how every few years the US just casually tries to install a coup regime in the oil-rich nation of Venezuela and the western political-media class treats this as perfectly normal. And then they’ll have the gall to shriek about “election interference” if some Russians make some Facebook memes about a presidential race or whatever. Really says a lot about how evil, entitled, supremacist and stupid western civilization is. ...........



One of the dumbest things about US politics today is the way both parties constantly attack each other for holding foreign policy positions they don’t actually hold in order to create the illusion th at they have meaningful disagreements on foreign policy. 

Donald Trump has been campaigning on the cartoonishly ridiculous claim that Biden and Harris have been unsupportive to Israel even as they continue to unconditionally support its genocide in Gaza, which is a perfect mirror of the way Democrats spent years falsely claiming that Trump is a secret agent of the Kremlin even as he ramped up cold war aggressions against Russia. They need to campaign on these completely fictional disagreements regarding the enemies and allies of the US government, because they do not actually have real disagreements regarding the enemies and allies of the US government. ............

It was a narrative that was completely divorced from reality, held in place by nothing but rote repetition and authoritative-sounding assertions. ...........



The remarkable thing about Trump is that for all the talk about what a extremist wingnut he is, nobody benefits from his existence more than the two mainstream political parties of the United States. He helps sheepdog both the right and the left into the mainstream so-called “center” of US politics.

It’s clear at a glance that Trump helps ensure that right wing Americans who are dissatisfied with their country’s status quo politics will remain plugged into the Republican Party, which never does anything besides promoting the imperial status quo of oligarchy and militarism. But what takes a little more looking to see is that he plays the same role for the left as well.

In 2015 and early 2016, American progressives were buzzing with the possibility of real change in their country. Bernie Sanders was going to help them take back their nation from the millionaires and billionaires and corporations and banks, and get them fair wages and a normal healthcare system so they won’t have to work excruciatingly hard for excruciatingly little anymore. Then when Hillary secured the nomination and Sanders endorsed her everyone forgot about all that, and the struggle became about stopping the next Adolph Hitler from taking power in their own country.

And that’s the role that Trump has played ever since: keeping the fight about stopping fascism and preventing the end of American democracy so that the fight won’t be about economic justice and ending the abuses of the capitalist class. His political existence ensures that the tug-o-war game begins on the right side of the stage, so that everyone’s always pulling toward the Clintonite “center” of war, capitalism and imperialism instead of toward the left. 

And if I were an obscenely rich guy who wanted to make sure the rich get to keep their obscene wealth, that’s probably what I’d do too. I’d openly step as far to the right as I could get away with and take up as much political space as I can, thereby dragging the spectrum of debate as far away from the left as possible so that everyone’s begging to keep the status quo politics which gave me my obscene wealth in the first place. If I were an American plutocrat or warmongering empire manager, I’d be very happy to see Trump doing what he’s doing, and I’d want him to do it more.

It’s only because of Trump that we’re now seeing American progressives pretending to be excited and enthused about Kamala Harris like a bunch of bad actresses in a third-rate porno movie. “Ooh, girlboss! I actually kind of like her now because of those funny memes!” Come on sweetheart, who do you think you’re fooling? At least learn how to properly fake an orgasm for the camera. 

If not for Trump, the US political spectrum would be drifting further and further to the left instead of to the right as the possibility of a better future begins to ignite the imaginations of Americans nationwide. Instead you’ve got a depressingly impotent faction of progressive Democrats who’ll occasionally stick their head above the parapet to say something innocuous like “tax the rich” before ducking back down to unequivocally endorse whichever murderous empire goon has been elevated to the top of their party that election cycle, because the only thing that matters right now is stopping Trump.

And what’s funny is that Trump didn’t even wind up governing as some kind of freakish aberration; in terms of real concrete policy and actions his administration was a fairly normal sort of evil in the same way other Republican administrations are evil, not even rising to the level of depravity of George W Bush. Hell, more imperial bloodshed and suffering has been unleashed under Biden than there was under Trump. .......

It’s a brilliant scam, and it’s working perfectly. So perfectly in fact that we may be sure they’re going to keep repeating it with different characters long after Trump’s gone, and will keep it going until people begin to see through the act.



................. Leaving aside the arguments one can make that Kamala Harris is actually quite bad on domestic policy, this separation of “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” is a dishonest talking point which only resonates with sloppy thinkers, and arises from a rather ugly underlying worldview.

Splitting up “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” on questions of right and wrong only makes sense if you believe harming foreigners is more morally acceptable than harming Americans. “Kamala is bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy” just means “American lives are innately superior.” It can only feel true from the inside of an American supremacist worldview. ................

The only reason this kind of chowderheaded reasoning works on anyone at all is because the American propaganda services known as the mainstream media put a lot of energy into keeping Americans from thinking too hard about what their government is up to overseas ...............

And let me preempt any objections that the two major presidential candidates are always murderous warmongers by saying, I know. Believe me, I know. You can use that fact to argue that because they’re both corrupt genocide monsters you may as well support the genocide monster who might make things a tiny bit less hard for some people in one small part of the world, or you can actually look at what I’m pointing at here and really ingest the horror of the situation the powerful have created for you and your compatriots. The fact that you’re only allowed to vote for corrupt genocide monsters should shake you to your core, and that’s what should be the main focus of everyone’s political attention. It’s only because Americans are the most propagandized people on earth that this isn’t happening. .............



The thing I hate about western electoral politics in general and US presidential races in particular is that they take the focus off the depravity of the US-centralized empire itself, and run cover for its criminality.

In the coming months you’re going to be hearing a lot of talk about the two leading presidential candidates and how very very different they are from each other, and how one is clearly much much worse than the other. But in reality the very worst things about both of them will not be their differences — the worst things about them will be be the countless ways in which they are both indistinguishably in lockstep with one another. 

Donald Trump is not going to end America’s non-existent “democracy” if elected and rule the United States as an iron-fisted dictator, and he’s certainly not going to be some kind of populist hero who leads a revolution against the Deep State. He will govern as your standard evil Republican president who is evil in all the usual ways US presidents are evil, just like he did during his first term. His administration will continue to fill the world with more war machinery, implement more starvation sanctions, back covert operations, uprisings and proxy conflicts, and work to subjugate the global population to the will of the empire, all while perpetuating the poisoning of the earth via ecocidal capitalism, just as all his predecessors have done.

And the same will be true of whatever moronic fantasies Republicans wind up concocting about Kamala Harris between now and November. She’s not going to institute communism or give everyone welfare, implement Sharia law, weaken Israel, take everyone’s guns, subjugate Americans to the “Woke Agenda” and make everyone declare their pronouns and eat bugs, or any of that fuzzbrained nonsense. She will continue to expand US warmongering and tyranny while making the world a sicker, more violent, and more dangerous place for everyone while funneling the wealth of the people and the planet into the bank accounts of the already obscenely rich. Just as Biden has spent his entire term doing, and just as Trump did before him.

The truth is that while everyone’s going to have their attention locked on the differences between Trump and Harris these next few months, by far the most significant and consequential things about each of these candidates are the ways in which they are similar. ..........

But nobody’s going to be watching any of that normalized criminality while the drama of this fake election plays out. More and more emotional hysteria is going to get invested in the outcome of this fraudulent two-handed sock puppet popularity contest between two loyal empire lackeys who are both sworn to advance the interests of the empire no matter which one wins, and the mundane day-to-day murderousness of the empire will continue to tick on unnoticed in the background. .........

Whenever I talk about this stuff I get people accusing me of being defeatist and interpreting this message as a position that there’s nothing anyone can do, but that’s not true at all. I’m just saying the fake election ritual you’ve been given by the powerful and told that’s how you solve your problems is not the tool for the job. You’re as likely to solve your problems by voting as you are by wishing or by praying — but that doesn’t mean problems can’t be solved. If you thought you could cure an infection by huffing paint thinner I’d tell you that won’t work either, and tell you to go see a doctor instead.

Just because the only viable candidates in any US presidential race will always be murderous empire lackeys doesn’t mean things are hopeless; that’s just what it looks like when you live in the heart of an empire that’s held together by lies, violence and tyranny, whose behavior has too much riding on it for the powerful to allow it to be left to the will of the electorate.

Your vote won’t make any difference to the behavior of the empire, but what can make a difference is taking actions every day to help pave the way toward a genuine people’s uprising against the empire later on down the road. You do this by opening people’s eyes to the reality that what they’ve been taught about their government, their nation and their world is a lie, and that the mainstream sources they’ve been trained to look to for information are cleverly disguised imperial propaganda services. ......

There is nothing that could stop us once enough of us understand what’s happening. That’s why so much effort goes into obfuscating people’s understanding, and keeping everyone endlessly diverted with empty nonsense like presidential elections.



Q1: Who will you be voting for in November?

A: Kamala Harris (and mainstream Democrats all down the ballot), of course.

Q2: Of course?

A: If the alternative is Trump, I would’ve voted for Biden’s rotting corpse. Or for Hunter Biden. Or for…

Q3: Why can’t you see this is just your Trump Derangement Syndrome talking?

A: Look, my basic moral commitments remain pretty much as they’ve been since childhood. Namely, that I’m on the side of reason, Enlightenment, scientific and technological progress, secular government, pragmatism, democracy, individual liberty, justice, intellectual honesty, an American-led peaceful world order, preservation of the natural world, mitigation of existential risks, and human flourishing. (Crazy and radical, I know.)

Only when choosing between candidates who all espouse such values, do I even get the luxury of judging them on any lower-order bits. Sadly, I don’t have that luxury today. Trump’s values, such as they are, would seem to be “America First,” protectionism, vengeance, humiliation of enemies, winning at all costs, authoritarianism, the veneration of foreign autocrats, and the veneration of himself. No amount of squinting can ever reconcile those with the values I listed before. ................

[.............. some good points amidst some bullshit .................]

Q16: What, if anything, could Republicans do to get you to vote for them?

A: Reject all nutty conspiracy theories. Fully, 100% commit to the peaceful transfer of power. Acknowledge the empirical reality of human-caused climate change, and the need for both technological and legislative measures to slow it and mitigate its impacts. Support abortion rights, or at least a European-style compromise on abortion. Republicans can keep the anti-wokeness stuff, which actually seems to have become their defining issue. If they do all that, and also the Democrats are taken over by frothing radicals who want to annihilate the state of Israel and abolish the police … that’s, uh, probably the point when I start voting Republican. .........


On maturing from dissidents to leaders

The tide is turning. The leftoids, be they Democrats, globalists, Xitter cringefluencers, non-binary-trannisaries, or Home Depot sows are losing, or losing their minds.

They’re so lost right now that even their “leader” has gone missing, removed from office by a statement he almost certainly did not write, probably posted by a social media intern that did not actually work for him. I’m not convinced he either knew that it happened when it did, or for that matter, knows where he is.

They’re in such shambles that at times I wonder if it’s all a little too easy? But then I remember how incompetence breeds incompetence, and lies breed lies. Mix the two together and you have a powerful cocktail of fuckery that will ultimately come crashing down. And crashing down it is. .............



Normally, I let my pen rest during the summer months, but for some things, you set aside your habits. What has been happening in the context of the U.S. presidential elections over the past few weeks is, to say the least, remarkable. We are witnessing a social system that – to use a term from complex dynamic systems theory – is heading toward a catastrophe. And the essence of the tipping point we are approaching is this: the propaganda model is beginning to fail.

***

It started a few weeks ago like this: Trump, the presidential candidate who must not win, is up against Biden, the presidential candidate who must win. After the first debate, it was immediately clear: Trump will win against Biden. The big problem: Biden and Jill are about the only ones who don't realize this.

The media then turned against Biden. That, in itself, is a revolution. They had praised President Biden to the skies for four years, turning a blind eye to the fact that the man either seemed hardly aware of what he was saying or was giving speeches that could only be described as having the characteristics of a fascist leader.

I'm thinking, among other things, of the 2022 midterm speech in which he, against a bombastic-dramatic backdrop and flanked by two soldiers with machine guns, more or less directly called for violence against the Maga followers. Not to mention the shameless prosecution and imprisonment of political opponents and the intimidation and excommunication of hundreds of journalists (carefully kept out of the media by journalists who sided with the regime).

Huxley would not be surprised that Biden claims in almost every speech that he had to save democracy, including his most recent speech. I've shared the quote below before, but it doesn't hurt to read it a second time:

‘By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms — elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest — will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial — but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.’

In any case, the media’s love for Biden was suddenly over when it became clear that he could not possibly win the election, even not with a little help from the media. If you want to know how that 'little help' worked in 2020, look at one of the most important interviews of the past year, where Mike Benz – former director of the cyber portfolio of the U.S. government – explains to Tucker Carlson in detail how information flows on the internet were manipulated during the 2020 elections (and the COVID crisis). The guy eventually got disgusted from what he was doing and now runs a project striving for online freedom of speech.  I would recommend everyone to spend an hour watching that interview. Such an explanation is what we need: calm, expert, nuanced, and extraordinarily revealing.

After the first debate, the media realized that even they could not help Biden win the election. They changed their approach. Biden was quickly stripped of his saintly status. The Veil of Appearances was pulled away, and he suddenly stood naked and vulnerable in the eye of the mainstream – a man in the autumn of his life, mentally confused, addicted to power, and arrogant. Some journalists even started attributing traits of the Great Narcissistic Monster Trump to him.

But even media pressure couldn’t make Biden change his mind. He was so far gone that he did not see the hopelessness of his situation. That did not change when the Democratic elite turned their backs on him. Barak, Hillary, Nancy – it didn't matter, the presidential candidate who couldn't win kept stumbling in a lost race.

Then things took another turn, a turn so predictable that one is astonished that it actually happened. An overaged teenager calmly climbed onto a roof with a sniper rifle, under the watchful eyes of the security services, and nearly shot Trump in the head. The security services, which initially did not respond for minutes when people tried to draw attention to the overaged teenager with an assault rifle, suddenly reacted decisively: they shot the overaged teenager dead seconds after the assassination attempt.

What happened there? There are many reasons to have reservations about Trump, but one thing we cannot help but say: if Trump becomes president, the war in Ukraine will be over. Anyone who does not attribute any weight to that should subject themselves to a conscience examination. And no, Trump will not have to give half of Europe to Putin for that. My cautious estimate, for what it's worth: It will suffice for NATO to stop and partially reverse its eastward expansion, for Russia to retain access to the Black Sea via Crimea (something everyone with historical awareness knows that denying would mean the death blow to Russia as a great power and thus a direct declaration of war), and for the population of the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine to choose in a referendum whether to belong to Russia or Ukraine.

One of the biggest and most dangerous media lies of this time is that Putin started an 'unprovoked war' in Ukraine. I recommend a second interview by Tucker Carlson here (undoubtedly one of the most important contemporary journalists, one of the few who still fulfill the original societal function of journalism). The interview with professor and former top diplomat Jeffrey Sachs also has everything a good interview should have: given with great expertise, calm, and nuanced. Anyone who still believes that the war in Ukraine was 'unprovoked' after listening to it is kindly invited to explain themselves in the comments section of this article.

So, I repeat my point: with Trump, the provocation of Russia stops, and the war in Ukraine ends. Presidents who threaten to end wars are sometimes shot at by lone gunmen. And those lone gunmen are, in turn, shot dead. And the archives about that remarkable act of lone gunmen sometimes remain sealed for a remarkably long time, much longer than they usually do.

The media ultimately covered this historical event of the Trump assassination attempt surprisingly lightly. No journalist to be found pointing a finger at Biden because he had more or less literally called to 'target' Trump a few months earlier. Let alone the media admitting that they created the unspoken support in the population for this political violence. Neither did I find journalists who were greatly concerned that the overaged teenager was linked to Antifa – nothing wrong with Antifa according to them. I can imagine that the moral appreciation would have been different if an overaged teenager linked to the Maga movement had nearly taken down President Biden.

Anyway, we are not surprised. That reaction was predictable. We are used to the media. Some journalists even suggested that Trump had been shot with a paintball, others thought the most accurate way to report was that someone 'wounded Trump on the ear'.

In any case, after the assassination attempt, the situation became even more dire for the mainstream: the presidential candidate who must not win is now even more popular, and his victory in a race with Biden is almost inevitable.

Then the next chapter begins. Biden suddenly changes his mind: he has come to his senses and drops out of the race. He announces this - of all things - in a letter with a signature that, even for his shaky condition, looked quite clumsy. Then he stayed out of the public eye for a few days. We are curious about what exactly happened there.

But the media are compliant again. Biden has now been sanctified again. Just like Kamala Harris, of course. They are already mentioning polls showing she will beat Trump. With a little help from the media, of course. Curious how this will continue, but I would be surprised if the rest of the campaign will be a walk in the park. Trump is not safe after the first attempt, that's for sure. And to Kamala Harris, I say this: when totalitarian systems go into a chaotic phase, they become monsters that devour their own children.

****

It is hard to ignore: the indoctrination and propaganda model is creaking and groaning at all its seams. The Veil of Appearances that is meant to hide all dirty laundry from the public eye is tearing left and right. And that's why the step toward terror is increasingly being taken. One can see something frightening in it, but it also heralds the beginning of the end of the propaganda model. No one knows exactly how long the endgame will last, but it is certain that the system is in deep crisis. From the fact that the Democrats ran with someone like Biden and then had to force him out in this amateurish and transparent manner, we can only conclude one thing with certainty: the desperation must be enormous.

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the failure of the greatest propaganda apparatus in history. And at that point, we also see a fact that people absorbed by conspiracy thinking make: they overestimate the perceived enemy not only as too evil but also (much) too powerful. In this way, one can only feel smaller and feel more and more powerlessness, anger and hate, exactly the sentiments that will prove deadly in the coming years.

The general reduction of everything that happens to a conspiracy, not seeing a Reality behind the manipulation and illusions created, is itself a symptom of this time. Conspiracies exist. No one needs to convince me of that. And one problem of this time is that most people who identify with the mainstream discourse have a remarkable ability to deny that. And they have an equally great ability to ignore that they themselves eagerly produce conspiracy theories when it comes to Putin or Saddam Hussein or 'extreme right'.

Conspiracy theories sometimes correctly relate to facts, and sometimes incorrectly. However, they do not provide a comprehensive explanation for global events. They do not touch the essence of the problem. The essence of the problem lies in rationalism and the associated human arrogance. And this hubris is certainly not the privilege of 'the elite.' It is even typical of conspiracy thinking itself, which ultimately attempts to capture the essence of social dynamics through a rationalistic construction. And precisely because of this, conspiracy thinking, just like the dominant discourse, falls prey to a Babylonian confusion. Like the dominant discourse, they fail to bring true peace regarding the Real that increasingly imposes itself from behind the Veil of Appearances in this historical era.

In times when America is dangerously heading towards a civil war, the golden advice is: do not be tempted by the possibility of violence. Stay calm and composed. And continue to speak. Totalitarianism dehumanizes; the only remedy against totalitarianism is to always recognize a human being in the Other. Also in the Totalitarian Other. What is happening is historical. Stand on the right side of history. This is not the side of the Democrats or the side of the Republicans, it is not the side of Trump or the side of Harris; it is the side of humanity, it is the side of those who are not so convinced of their own words that they can no longer find any space for the words of another to exist.


As in Gaza, the Deprivation Is Deliberate

For months, we’ve all been able to stay reasonably informed about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But there’s another horrific war that’s gotten so little coverage you could be excused for not knowing anything about it. What we have in mind is the seemingly never-ending, utterly devastating war in Sudan. Think of it as the missing war. And if we don’t start paying a lot more attention to it soon — as in right now — it’s going to be too late. ........................



China’s growing presence in Africa has captured global attention. As its trade deals and investments have eclipsed those of the West, politicians from the US and EU have raised the alarm: Beijing, they say, is exploiting the continent’s resources, threatening its jobs and buttressing its dictators, while casting political or environmental considerations to the side. African civil society organizations level many of the same criticisms, while also pointing out that Western countries have long engaged in similar practices. In the Anglophone media, most assessments of China’s outlook are clouded by the rhetoric of the New Cold War, which frames Xi Jinping as bent on world domination and calls on the forces of civilization to stop him. What would a more sober analysis look like? How should we understand Africa’s role in this hostile geopolitical matrix?  

Chinese interests in Africa – and Western concerns about Beijing’s influence – are nothing new. Understanding the current standoff requires us to trace its history. In April 1955, representatives of 29 Asian and African nations and territories gathered for a landmark conference in Bandung, Indonesia. They resolved to wrest autonomy from the capitalist core by promoting economic and cultural cooperation, as well as decolonization and national liberation, throughout the Global South. Thereafter, Chinese engagement with Africa was guided by this spirit of solidarity. ................

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, China had surpassed the US as Africa’s largest trading partner, and it has recently become the continent’s fourth largest source of foreign direct investment. In exchange for guaranteed access to energy resources, agricultural land and materials for electronic devices and electric vehicles, China has spent billions of dollars on African infrastructure: building and renovating roads, railroads, dams, bridges, ports, oil pipelines and refineries, power plants, water systems and telecommunications networks. Chinese enterprises have also constructed hospitals and schools, and invested in clothing and food processing industries, along with agriculture, fisheries, commercial real estate, retail and tourism. The latest investments have focused on communications technology and renewable energy.

Unlike Western powers and the international financial institutions they dominate, Beijing has not made political and economic restructuring a condition for its loans, investments, aid or trade. ................

For decades, China opposed political and military interference in the internal affairs of other nations. Yet as Beijing’s economic interests in Africa have grown, it has adopted a more interventionist approach, involving disaster relief, anti-piracy and counterterrorism operations. .........

Although Washington decries what it calls Chinese imperialism, its own military footprint in Africa is much larger, consisting of 29 bases in resource-rich areas. The US vows to fend off ‘evil empires’ while boasting more than 750 bases in at least 80 countries, compared to China’s 3. It has fought at least 15 foreign wars since 1980 – China has joined only one – and the fiscal regimes it has imposed on African nations, based on privatization, deregulation and spending constraints, have been ruinous. The US security establishment now aims to contain China’s rise by bolstering military alliances, especially with regimes that have received Chinese investment. Yet a growing number of African states, aware of this disastrous record, are refusing to take sides in the New Cold War, and are instead trying to play its combatants off against each other. The truth is, though, that as long as Africa is treated as a means for rival powers to expand their markets or influence, in collaboration with local elites, the people of the continent will not exercise true sovereignty. Today, legacies of the Bandung are in short supply.


Eager to exterminate the people of Donbass and seize their land, the U.S. under both Trump and Biden armed Kiev to the teeth. One teenage activist appeals to Trump to stop murdering her people.

Under Joe Biden, the U.S. has become the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism and the greatest threat to the global order by supporting some of the most brutal and repressive regimes on earth, such as Ukraine.

Since 2014, when Ukrainian nationalist radicals seized power in Kiev with U.S. help, the ethnic Russians living in former eastern Ukraine (now the new territories of the Russian Federation) have been targeted for extermination according to plans approved by the U.S. and UK as part of efforts to expand NATO to the Russian border.

The yearning for freedom and dignity among the people of Donbass and Crimea should resonate with every American, but the western disinformation machine prevents most Americans from learning the truth about Ukraine and Russia. .....

If you live in the West, you probably haven’t heard of Faina; that’s because major western media are forbidden to interview her, and she’s on a U.S.-supported assassination list compiled by Ukraine, (Mirotvorets).

Let that sink in — a 15-year old Donbass girl who calls for peace and justice is hunted by Ukrainian assassins with the help of the U.S. government.

In an attempt to bring her people’s plight to the attention of the American people and to bring peace to her land, earlier this week Faina penned a letter to Donald Trump. Below you’ll find the entire text, which makes clear that Faina is mature and wise beyond her years, far more than anyone in Washington DC and London.

The U.S. and British media have a news blackout on her. The U.S. and UK want to kill her and seize her people’s land. Is this really who we are as a nation? Well, it’s who we’ve become — Two violent rogue nations (the U.S. and UK) out of step with the wishes of the global community and that now define the new axis of evil. .............


...


Sci Fare:

New research hints that plate tectonics began earlier than 4 billion years ago — not long after Earth had formed.



RIP Fare:

Scott wrote about the ways people resist authority—and the unmapped territories where much of that resistance takes place.

James C. Scott, who died July 19 at age 87, was one of the most original and radical political theorists of the past century. ............

Scott is sometimes described as an anarchist, and he was influenced by a number of anarchist thinkers (especially Colin Ward). But he was ambivalent about whether abolishing the state entirely was a practical goal—to quote one of his book titles, he gave just Two Cheers for Anarchism. Nor would he describe himself as a free-market libertarian: While there was obvious overlap between his thinking and, say, Friedrich Hayek's ideas about dispersed knowledge, Scott saw his work as a critique of large-scale corporate capitalism as well as of the state. In an oral history interview conducted in 2018, he remembered William Niskanen of the Cato Institute calling to ask if he would speak at a libertarian event: "I remember my partner was with me and I put my hand over the phone and said to her, 'What have I done wrong that the Cato Institute is calling me and wants me to sort of talk at their conference?'" ..........


Unfilled shoes in our culture



It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other; think of Michelangelo as a poet, of Michael Jordan as a baseball player. This is a trap that Lewis Lapham has largely avoided. For the past half century, he has been getting pretty much equal esteem in a pair of distinct roles: editor and essayist. As an editor, he is hailed for his three-decade career at the helm of Harper’s, America’s second-oldest magazine, which he reinvigorated in 1983; and then, as an encore a decade ago, for Lapham’s Quarterly, a wholly new kind of periodical in his own intellectual image. As an essayist, he was called “without a doubt our greatest satirist” by Kurt Vonnegut. 

By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books. He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America, a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark, trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said. All the while, a new issue of Harper’s would hit the newsstands every month, with a lead essay by Lapham that couched his erudite observations on American society and politics in Augustan prose.

Today Lapham is the rare surviving eminence from that literary world. But he has managed to keep a handsome bit of it alive ................



Other Fare:


Religion is a subset of ideology, and ideology is a set of beliefs about how how the world is and how the world should be. Capitalism is an ideology. Communism is an ideology. Scientism is an ideology. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and so on are religious ideologies.

The boundary between the two is weak. Communism and Scientism make metaphysical statements. Communism and Scientism generally state that there is no soul, there is no afterlife and there are no supernatural beings.

Capitalism believes that people, out of self interest (greed and selfishness), act in ways that create welfare for the majority. This is a radical belief, held by almost no one and no other belief system in history. It also believes in unlimited growth. The combination of these beliefs is going to wind up killing a few billion people.

But the worst religious belief is almost certainly “there is an afterlife, and only thru this religion can you achieve it. If you don’t worship this religion you will be tormented for eternity after death.” ...........


C.S. Lewis and Iris Murdoch on Attentional Humility


What Has Travel Ever Done for Me?





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