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Saturday, December 28, 2024

2024-12-28

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


Economic and Market Fare:



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



Bubble Fare:


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

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

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

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



Quotes of the Week:


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

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

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



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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Welsh: Some countries need less population

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

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



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



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



U.S. B.S.


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

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

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


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



Geopolitical Fare:




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

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



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


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





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

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

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



Sci Fare:






Other Fare:



Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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


Please just get it over with

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

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



Pics of the Week:





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