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Tuesday, August 19, 2025

2025-08-19

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


Economic and Market Fare:




Executive Summary
Despite the second quarter GDP growth, the figures have some worrying trends that suggest that the US economy is heading into a period of noticeably slower growth which is likely thanks to the impact of tariffs on inflation, the tightening of the labor market and as a consequence shrinking consumer spending.

With the price increases occurring as a result of the new tariff policies, it will eat into real incomes, at a time when consumer spending is starting to look a bit shaky.  Monthly retail sales and personal spending have started to cool in the last couple of months, despite the increase in prices. It is evident that spending on balance has stagnated for the first six months of the year which rarely happens outside of a recession.



While the macro backdrop is giving mixed messages, other signals are decidedly bullish.

The technical evidence has been strong, as the U.S. stock market is acting like it normally does coming off a major low.

First, the breadth thrusts that triggered shortly after the April lows indicated a new uptrend was underway. Second, leadership was consistent with previous recoveries after large corrections, with tech and other offensive groups like financials leading. Third, long-term breadth readings began to reach levels that confirmed uptrends which were proven sustainable in previous cycles.

Of course, it is not perfect. Many stock groups are working through overbought readings while sentiment has improved as we find ourselves in a seasonally weak time of the year. ..........

While prices can swing on sentiment or idiosyncratic developments, stocks over time tend to follow the direction of earnings growth because a company’s ability to generate profit ultimately drives its value.

As we enter the final stages of the Q2 reporting season, with ~90% of companies having reported, EPS growth is tracking at +11-12% YoY whereas the expectation at the start of the quarter was +4%. This follows a similar pattern from Q1.

84% of companies have beat estimates, surprising positively by 9%.

These sterling results come at a time when many investors feared an outright contraction in earnings growth due to the tremendous storm clouds around trade policy, passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the potential emergence of another inflation wave. .............


Weight of the Evidence tilts toward Opportunity despite macro concerns




The 4 Ratios That Tell the Market’s Real Story
......................
Robust Risk On Behavior
My goal is to develop robust investment frameworks.
That means we never take one of these ratios on its own as a reason to make a decision.
We want to weigh the evidence, look at them in aggregate, and see which way the scale is leaning.
Right now, these four ratios alongside this pop in Small Caps are all lined up in the same direction.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be volatility or negative headlines.
But it does mean the weight of evidence suggests it’s still a time to be more opportunistic than fearful.
Is that a surprise? No. We’re in the midst of a Bull Market.
But keeping a close eye on these ratios ensures we’ll know where to look when risk-seeking becomes the exception, not the rule.
Until then……the risk is not taking any.


The Three Americas and aspirational displacement

The US is operating with 3 broken gears that no longer connect. There are currently 3 Americas:

America 1 (The Speculative Class): The first America is the speculative class, and its engine is artificial intelligence. The Magnificent 7 are spending over $100 billion a quarter on data centers, which are these monumental projects of hope. They consume vast amounts of capital and electricity, a place where money and power are absorbed in a high-stakes gamble.

America 2 (The Real Economy): The second America is the real economy. With 75% of new jobs in healthcare and social assistance, our workforce is being absorbed by the essential but underfunded ‘maintenance economy’ of an aging population. While it props up the labor market, it fails to generate the type of wealth that fuels the stock market or long-term growth, as resources are poured into maintenance rather than creation.

America 3 (The Memes): The third America is the bridge between the other two, acting somewhat as a psychological gold sink for those who are priced out of a house and a future. The money spent here is largely speculative and doesn't build a sustainable future (is memecoin investing productive, I don’t know) but it gives people a sense of agency and hope within a system that otherwise offers them little.

It’s a very strange world. ........................



P.E. Fare:

Trump "democratizing" private equity fee income, one retail investor at a time.

President Trump has made the move to firmly hit private equity’s (PE) G-Spot: unfettered access to the $12 trillion 401(k) market. This past Thursday, Trump signed an executive order Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(K) Investors

The order directs the Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer to review and potentially remove the biggest obstacle PE has had in gaining access to 401(k) plans, most notably the plan manager being sued for not performing their fiduciary responsibilities by investing in PE. That’s what happened in 2015 when Intel employees sued the company for what they considered to be lousy returns from PE investments. .............



Bubble Fare:

********** Hussman: The Bubble Term

.......................... The word “bubble” gets tossed around quite a bit. Usually, it comes in the form of verbal arguments about whether prices have advanced to a point that’s “too high” in some sense.

We can do much better than that. A bubble is a mathematical object.

As I’ve observed before, bubbles are generated when investors drive valuations higher without simultaneously adjusting their expectations for future returns lower. That is, investors extrapolate past returns based on price behavior, even though the resulting expectations about future returns are inconsistent with the returns that would equate price with discounted cash flows. ...................................


.......... A reliable valuation gauge is nothing but shorthand for a proper discounted cash flow analysis. As I’ve detailed across decades of market commentaries, the valuation gauges we use are faithful to that requirement. So, valuations offer beautiful intuition about the growing gap between the future returns in investors heads, and the future returns that one would project based on discounted cash flows. ....................

That’s just arithmetic. The actual total return of the S&P 500 for any given holding period has three pieces: the annual growth in fundamentals F, the annualized change in valuations (Price/F) during the holding period, and the average dividend yield during that period.

Over the past 10, 20 and 30 years, nominal GDP, S&P 500 revenues, and corporate gross value added have grown by only about 4.5% annually. Suppose that growth continues. The current S&P 500 dividend yield is only about 1.2%. So if valuations can remain at current extremes forever, the expected return arithmetic says 4.5% + 1.2% = 5.7% nominal.

If valuations decline to some lower level, the effect is to reduce expected returns by (future V / current V)^(1/T)-1 where T is the number of years. For example, a decline in MarketCap/GVA from the current extreme of 3.7 to a level no lower than the 2000 peak of 2.5, would lower 10-year total returns by (2.5/3.7)^(1/10)-1 = -3.8%. The resulting 10-year nominal total return estimate then becomes 5.7%-3.8% = 1.9% annually, and even less if inflation is positive. That’s not a theory, it’s just arithmetic. The only issue is whether investors assume the bubble will be permanent. ......................

Now look at fiscal policy. As I’ve noted before – equilibrium again – anytime one sector runs a deficit (consumption and net investment over-and-above income), some other sector must run a surplus (income over-and-above consumption and net investment). That’s not a theory. It’s just an accounting identity. That accounting identity has played out in real time in ways that investors don’t seem to fully recognize.

Specifically, as government deficits exploded in recent years – particularly resulting from a combination of tax cuts and pandemic spending – corporate free cash flows also exploded. They had to. This wasn’t because of some new-era productivity boom. It was because of equilibrium. It’s just an accounting identity. But it creates a situation where perpetually extreme corporate earnings now rely on perpetually extreme government deficits. They are mirror images of each other. ...........

Although interest rates are no longer at zero, the massive corporate debt refinancing in 2020-2021 has delayed the impact of the “liftoff” from zero rates. The current bubble extreme rests at the very top of that house of cards. Put simply, investors now rely on an ever-expanding Bubble Term that was driven by “free money” monetary and fiscal policies that will not only have to persist – but will have to expand without limit in order to sustain that Bubble Term.



Quotes of the Week:

“The bull case remains a convincing one, with earnings growth solid, and a cooler tone on trade continuing to prevail, all the while dovish policy expectations help to provide a cushion against any worries that the economy may be softening,” said Michael Brown, senior research strategist at Pepperstone.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg TV that rates should likely be 150-175 basis points lower. “We could go into a series of rate cuts here, starting with a 50 basis-point rate cut in September,” he said.



Charts:
1: 
2: 
3: 
5: 
6:

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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Canada’s response to the extreme weather threat is being upended as the traditional epicentre of the blazes shifts as the climate warms



Ted Nordhaus wants us to stop talking about climate catastrophe. He calls Amazon collapse, crossing tipping points, and weather shocks exaggerations. He acknowledges that the world is headed toward 3°C of warming, but is confident that society will adapt.

That is techno-optimism at its most absurd—ignoring physiology, geography, and demographics. At ~3°C, the world crosses into extreme mortality events, recurrent food shocks, and mass displacement as “normal” features of the system. ...........



Yves here. This is a terrific talk in which James Galbraith, recapping his work in Entropy Economics, explains how the foundations of economics are fundamentally at odds with the operation and limits of our physical world. Trust me, either put it on for a listen or find the time to read the transcript. Galbraith offers a fresh and important view of where what presents itself as economic logic is dead wrong and how we might go about making better policy decisions. ............



A.I. Fare:


Meta is building “Prometheus” and “Hyperion”, Elon Musk’s xAI has “Colossus”, and OpenAI is developing “Stargate” — each a more than $100bn project to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer and usher in a new generation of artificial intelligence.

But each of those gargantuan ventures is just a fraction of the spending required to build the data centres needed to power the AI era: one of the biggest movements of capital in modern history. .............


The future of A.I. is more Facebook, not jobs in space



U.S. B.S.:




Geopolitical Fare:


................................................... The Deep State’s game plan is total control: what really matters is the opening to establish a NATO corridor all the way to the Caspian.

There’s no way Nightingale will let that happen, not to mention Bear and Dragon: it would mean a direct NATO threat not only to the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), which unites three BRICS (Russia, Iran, India) and crosses the Caspian, but also the Chinese Silk Roads, whose corridors traverse Iran with possible branch outs to the Caucasus. ............

The most probable outcome is that the proxy war – and the SMO – will keep rollin’ on, but with the Deep State making extra bundles of euros by selling tons of weapons for NATO to dispatch to Kiev. But even without the promise of a new, serious, US-Russia security architecture, BRICS may still stand a chance to snatch a victory out of Goldfinger’s latest photo op.


Coercive bilateralism, strategic decoupling, and the erosion of multilateralism: a brave new world

............. Today, the global stage is dominated by three actors whose contrasting approaches define the future of international trade: a United States governed once again by that same unpredictable and aggressive style; a fractured European Union, led by leaders who resemble indecisive merchants lacking a clear strategic vision; and a methodical China, headed by a sober and calculating leader whose banner is multipolarity. These three powers, with their divergent paths, are reshaping the rules of global economic governance. ..............................

In this new order, trade policy is no longer dissociated from geopolitics. Markets are weapons; tariffs are instruments of the Cold War. And while the great powers clash, the rest of the world must choose a side… or risk being caught in the crossfire.



From Bosnia to Afghanistan, the neoliberal peace-building model has compounded conflicts and inequalities by eroding the core function of states and subordinating people’s needs to the interests of capital. But in Ukraine, the co-optation of the recovery process by private economic interests is being taken to a whole new level. .......................

................... The path we are now on is abysmal. We live in war economies. Part of the militaristic discourse is to claim that investments in weapons are not about waging wars but about ensuring peace. More weapons mean better defence, a sort of militarised insurance, we are told. This is nothing but gaslighting.

Cynthia Enloe, one of the most prominent feminist thinkers on militarism, has shown that it is a prerequisite to waging wars. Militarism is deployed to implicitly and explicitly foster societal support for and normalisation of war agendas. If we spend money on weapons instead of the public good, and if we allow our societies to be consumed by militarisation, while discounting peace as naïve and peace activists as dangerous, we will have war. .....................





........... Simply hilarious getting to watch the press squirm and spin. The sad fact is that the Western establishment is so infected with an intense hatred of Putin and Russia that they are incapable of actually listening to what Putin said.



My coalescing sense of the underwhelming Alaska Chats is that Russia has not materially varied from its longstanding terms.

Trump rolled into town with his "stealth" flyover, imagining he was the one giving an audience to Putin.

From start to finish it was perfectly evident to any discerning observer that it was just the opposite, and that Putin was there to repeat and to emphasize Russia's apparently inviolable terms.

........ I cannot understand how so many people seem to doubt the resolve of the Russians to continue fighting western forces for years to come pursuant to their clearly enunciated objectives.



Palestine is the moral question of our time because the abuse of the Palestinians is the most glaring, in-your-face symptom of the imperial disease. You can see the effects of so many of the empire’s abusive dynamics in how this thing is playing out, from racism to colonialism to militarism to war profiteering to mass media propaganda to empire-building to government corruption to suppression of free speech to ecocide to the heartless, mindless, soul-eating nature of the capitalist system under which we all live. 

But there’s more to it than that. The primary reason to place Palestine front and center as the moral issue of our time is because if we can’t sort out the morality of an active genocide backed by our own western governments, we’re not going to be able to sort out anything else. ............



............... I feel this so hard. Gaza doesn’t need our sadness, it needs out anger. It needs our rage. That’s the only appropriate response to a live-streamed genocide supported by your own government.

Sadness and grief are for natural disasters. Cancer diagnoses. Terrible accidents. This is not something that has passively happened to the people of Gaza, it’s something that’s been done to them by other people, and the people who are doing it have names and faces. It’s not a tragedy, it’s a crime. A crime that is still currently being perpetrated and urgently needs to be stopped, by any means necessary.

The correct response is rage. Rage toward the people who are responsible for this mass atrocity. The officials of the Israeli government and all their western allies. Their apologists and propagandists in the mainstream press. The war profiteers who are benefiting from an active genocide. Individual members of the IDF. The hasbarists who swarm social media and pollute our information ecosystem with manipulation and lies.

Celebrities and influencers who urge us to weep for Gaza are pushing us into passivity and defeatism by urging us to treat this like an unavoidable tragedy that has already happened instead of an unforgivable atrocity that is still underway. This is power-serving propaganda, and it deserves nothing but scorn. ...............





............... Snow Himbo asks on Twitter, “Given how horrifying reality is at present, what are some things you still have hope in?”

I still have hope in young people. Gen Z haven’t just been outperforming all of us on Gaza, they’ve been leading the charge. They’re simply a superior generation to the rest of us. This may be because they didn’t grown up marinating in the brainwashing of the mainstream media. It may also be because they’re the first generation in human history ever to have the ability to create their own culture without having culture imposed upon them by older generations; they’re learning about the world from streamers their own age discussing ideas while playing video games and TikTok personalities explaining politics while putting on makeup. The rest of us got our culture solely from our parents, teachers, Hollywood, and mass media propaganda. We were way more dumbed down, because knowledge was gate-kept from us.

I have hope in the expansion of consciousness. We’re growing so much more aware in so many ways, even as things apparently get darker and darker. Gaza is opening eyes at an unprecedented rate. ..........................



Science Fare:



COVID-19 can cause both acute and delayed neurological effects in children, ranging from headaches and fatigue to rare but severe brain disorders.



Tweet Vid of the Week:


Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, August 10, 2025

2025-08-10

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


Economic and Market Fare:



Canadian insurer's shares plummet with profit warning

Shares in Sun Life Financial Inc. tumbled as much as 8.5 per cent on Friday ...........



Bubble Fare:

AI Is A Money Trap

In the last week, we’ve had no less than three different pieces asking whether the massive proliferation of data centers is a massive bubble, and though they, at times, seem to take the default position of AI’s inevitable value, they’ve begun to sour on the idea that it’s going to happen soon.

Meanwhile, quirked-up threehundricorn OpenAI has either raised or is about to raise another $8.3 billion in cash, less than two months since it raised $10 billion from SoftBank and a selection of venture capital firms.

I hate to be too crude, but where the fuck is this money going? Is OpenAI just incinerating capital? Is it compute? Is it salaries? Is it compute? Is it to build data centers, because SoftBank isn’t actually building anything for Stargate?

The Information suggested OpenAI is using the money to build data centers — possibly the only worse investment it can make other than generative AI, and it’s one that it can’t avoid because OpenAI also is somehow running out of compute. And now they're in "early-stage discussions" about an employee share sale that would value the company at $500 billion, a ludicrous number that shows we're leaving the realm of reality. .........................



NPR recently reported that US house sales are down, while at the same time, prices are at their highest level ever.

And indeed they are. Bank of International Settlements data shows that US house prices are more than 2.5 times higher, in real terms, than they were when the first Baby Boomers became home owners in the 1970s. The Baby Boomers really did have it easier.

So, why are US home prices at all-time highs when almost no one can afford to buy? Who is rigging the game—and how does the system keep it this way?

The answer is simple: the banks did it.

The main factor making housing unaffordable in the USA–and most of the rest of the world–is too much mortgage lending by banks. This is not just a US phenomenon. It is common to every country that has deregulated its financial sector.

Gen Xers and Millennials can’t afford housing, not because supply is inadequate–which is the excuse used by conventional economists and politicians–but because banks have been allowed to lend too much money for housing.

Therefore, if average-income Gen Xers and Millenials and Alphas are ever going to be able to afford housing, bank lending must be controlled. .....................

Though USA real house prices are two and a half times as expensive as they were in 1970, this only puts the USA in the middle of the pack. UK house prices are five times as high as they were in 1970; Australian house prices are 4.2 times higher. Across the world, Gen Xers and Millenials are being screwed by the banks. It’s time to fight back. ............



Charts:
1: 



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


Our two recent papers (Global warming in the pipeline and Global warming has accelerated) [hereafter Paper 1 and Paper 2] were long – due to our research approach and our intent to raise numerous issues. Thus, we summarize the most important conclusions here.

Principal objectives of research in climate change are to evaluate climate sensitivity and the forcings that are driving climate change. Our analysis approach places comparable emphasis on each of three sources of information: (1) paleoclimate data, i.e., the long history of climate change, (2) modern observations of ongoing climate change, and (3) global climate modeling. Full exploitation of all three research tools allows conclusions to be reached with a higher degree of confidence than otherwise would be possible.

We summarize these three analyses, each in a page or at maximum two pages. These summaries are intended for people with some scientific bent. If we do not get such people to appreciate the science, the clique (see below) will continue to obfuscate reality. However, these summaries still make for a long document. Here we skip to the Summary. ...................


..................... The most obvious way to start assessing the progress of the required energy transition is to look at what has been accomplished during the past generation when the concerns about global decarbonization assumed a new urgency and prominence. Contrary to common impressions, there has been no absolute worldwide decarbonization. In fact, the very opposite is the case. The world has become much more reliant on fossil carbon (even as its relative share has declined a bit). We are now halfway between 1997 (27 years ago) when delegates of nearly 200 nations met in Kyoto to agree on commitments to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases, and 2050; the world has 27 years left to achieve the goal of decarbonizing the global energy system,

All we have managed to do halfway through the intended grand global energy transition is a small relative decline in the share of fossil fuel in the world’s primary energy consumption—from nearly 86% in 1997 to about 82% in 2022.  But this marginal relative retreat has been accompanied by a massive absolute increase in fossil fuel combustion: in 2022 the world consumed nearly 55% more energy locked in fossil carbon than it did in 1997 

By 2023 the absolute reliance on fossil carbon rose by 54% worldwide since the Kyoto commitment. In that quarter century, the world has substantially increased its dependence on fossil carbon.

Despite international agreements, government spending and regulations, and technological advancements, global fossil fuel consumption surged by 55% between 1997 and 2023. .........................................................


Exclusive finding by DeSmog shows high-level industry awareness that recycling plastic ‘not feasible’ as companies face lawsuits over alleged public deception campaign.





Sci Fare:




Geopolitical Fare:


.............. At this point all smart nations and blocs should be doing their best to reduce vulnerability to the US, to route around it and to move towards as much autarky as possible.

It’s notable that while China remains a huge trading power, the #1 economic priority over the last eight years has been making all major industrial stacks domestic: ending their need for industrial goods from other countries and reducing their need for imports of resources. Where that’s not possible, they have shifted to reliable partners like Russia and Iran and various other nations in Asia, Africa and South America.

John Maynard Keynes was of the opinion that anything a country needed, it should make or grow at home if at all feasible. Price arguments are largely ludicrous, because if you don’t have vast exposure to trade or need to buy important goods overseas and you don’t allow significant currency movements outside your border, prices are largely a domestic matter. That is to say, they are a matter of policy. Government actions largely determine the price of goods and services produced in the country IF the country is capable of producing those goods and services itself.

Or, again, as Keynes said, “anything we can do, we can afford.” (The corollary is that anything you can’t do, you can’t afford.)

Trade dependency is foolish. It may be necessary in some cases, and certain policy choices require it, like export driven industrialization. But once you’ve got an industrial base, it becomes a choice. .................



As the US flails about trying to maintain a dominance that’s already gone, it’s often difficult to analyze or predict US actions because they usually appear on their face so irrational. ...

The takeaway: building is hard. Destruction is easy. And in the case of the US it’s the destruction of economies, societies, and the planet through mafia logic. The first goal is to profit through extortion and rent-seeking. Everywhere. When that fails, Washington quickly pivots to its backup plan: regime change. But even that strategy is running out of steam these days.

There is little to no chance of forcing Russia and China to bend the knee, and Washington has few options aside from mutually assured destruction—either economic with Beijing or the good ol’ fashioned variety with Moscow. The attacks (and years of economic warfare) have thus far failed to bring about regime change in Tehran, and next time Iran, the thinking goes, will be more prepared—perhaps with China and Russia at its side. The bleed over from the thrashing about in impotent rage against Russia now has the US once again doing its best to push India off the fence and into the embrace of China and Russia.

There are still fever dreams in Washington of using ethnic divisions and proxy forces to take down Tehran, of destabilization in Moscow once Putin eventually dies, of economic or demographic forces weakening China, etc., but these are all based on wishful thinking rather than any realistic plan. In its place we’re seeing more lashing out, more sanctions, weaponized tariffs, and more bombings with Trump on a record airstrike pace. It’s not working. .................

........................ As the US descends deeper into Dr. Strangelove territory and violence, decay, and lawlessness reigns supreme, the great question is where and how does this madness end?

Here are two options. The crazy elites in the US need to be stopped or they’re going to kill us all—either slowly through a mixture of climate catastrophe, breakdown capitalism, and genocide or there’s always the nuclear option. ...............

What can the other powers like Russia and China do? They could start by locking down Eurasia. ............

.......... Israeli propagandists are now deploying this argument to justify the tragedy unfolding in Gaza. They no longer deny the brutal reality of starvation—though some still try—because the evidence is overwhelming and the cause so clear that their lies are exposed. What they attempt now is to deflect blame—either to Hamas, the UN, or any organization trying to help the Palestinians—or, in the face of undeniable deaths, to a preexisting medical condition. .............

The reality of the situation—the man-made, Western-enabled famine—is obvious to all of us. That is why Western governments are rushing to show the most irrelevant signs of support for the Palestinians who are dying: they want an excuse in case they are asked tomorrow. But it is too late. The stain of this genocide will haunt us all because we have entered uncharted ethical territory. ................

The possibility of something like this occurring while Israel maintains near-impunity poses many serious questions about international institutions, international law, and human rights. But one goes to the core of the social order under Western states: under which ethical framework—religious, secular, atheist, or otherwise—do Western governments operate if they do not uphold the first principle of ethics? It is an important question to ask because much of their legitimacy—and our safety—depends on it. .......



The dead of Gaza lie beneath the rubble of what was once a civilization. Half a million Palestinians—men, women, children, infants—have been exterminated in a genocide so brazen, so documented, so livestreamed in high definition that future historians will marvel not at the brutality itself, but at the world's obscene indifference to it. This is the first genocide in human history broadcast in real time, and most of the world has chosen to look away. .....................

But this is not merely a story of Israeli barbarism. This is the story of a world that has traded its soul for profit margins and geopolitical advantage. This is the story of how every major power on Earth—from Washington to Amsterdam, from Moscow to Riyadh—has revealed itself to be morally bankrupt when measured against the screams of burning children.

The Global South Had its Moment
The Global South had its moment. After five centuries of Western colonialism, after generations of suffering under the boot of Empire, the non-aligned world finally possessed the economic leverage to say "no more." China, with its vast trade networks, could have strangled Israel's economy overnight. Russia, despite being attacked by NATO with the help of Israel, maintains cozy relations with the architects of this genocide. Brazil, India, South Africa—all have chosen the path of what they euphemistically call "pragmatism," which is simply moral cowardice dressed up in diplomatic language. .......................

The West is Morally Dead
And what is the West's response to this deliberately engineered famine? More theater. More empty promises. More calls for a "two-state solution" that has been dead since before most of us were born. The same politicians who spent two years enabling this slaughter now pose as humanitarian saviors, offering crumbs of aid while the arms shipments continue unabated. They speak of Israel's "right to defend itself" against starving refugees while sending the bombs that turn children into dust.

The depravity is not limited to those directly complicit. It extends to every corporation that continues to trade with Israel, every university that maintains research partnerships, every pension fund that invests in the machinery of occupation. ......................

The Palestinians will not be saved by the international community, because there is no international community. There are only competing mafias dressed up in flags and anthems, each calculating how best to profit from the blood of the innocent. The resistance will continue, because it must. The rest of us will have to live with the knowledge that when history called, we were found wanting. When the test came, we failed. And the cries of the dead will follow us to our graves.



Other Fare:

As companies like Amazon and Microsoft lay off workers and embrace A.I. coding tools, computer science graduates say they’re struggling to land tech jobs.


As judges scout new restaurants to evaluate in U.S. cities, an anthropologist investigates the elite, Eurocentric history of the Michelin Red Guide and how it became the ultimate arbiter of culinary excellence



QOTW:

Stivers: “There was delicious irony in being lectured about freedom of the press by people being deranged by fake news.”



Fun Fare:




Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

2025-08-05

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


Economic and Market Fare:


A lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erika McEntarfer, the former Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust in the government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions.

Under McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) consistently published overly optimistic jobs numbers — only for those numbers to be quietly revised later: .......................

During McEntarfer’s tenure, BLS was consistently plagued by technical errors and leaks of sensitive information: ...................


A WSJ survey shows less pessimism regarding the second quarter. Uncertainty over trade policy and immigration is clouding the longer-term outlook.


Tariffs: A Race to the Bottom -- Why Take the Risks?



The news environment is noisy - the market environment is not. In fact stocks are as quiet (measured by the number of days since the last 1% swing on the S&P 500) and as strong (measured by the number of days in a row with more new highs than new lows) as they have been all year. Quiet strength is characteristic is bull markets. So are new highs - and that was what we are seeing from the S&P 500. 

Strong price action and broad rally participation is turning skeptics into believers. More on that below when we discuss Sentiment in the context of the Weight of the Evidence, but remember: it takes bulls to have a bull market. An expansion in optimism at this point is a healthy development and one that supports continued strength in stocks. .......



Goldman Sachs Group Inc. credit strategists are urging clients to hedge risks as yield premiums on global corporate notes tightened to their lowest since 2007 this week.

Recent trade deals between the US and its trading partners have provided clarity on the tariff front and “investors are willing to look through near-term growth softness as long as recession risks remain contained,” Goldman strategists led by Lotfi Karoui wrote in a note dated July 31. They warned, however, against complacency.

The yield premium on global investment-grade notes tightened to 79 basis points on Thursday, the lowest since July 2007 — just before the global financial crisis — according to a Bloomberg index. .............


The agency has faced tighter budgets, falling response rates to its surveys and a staff shortage



Map Shows States Where Bankruptcies Are Surging



Offense in on the Field

.............................. What matters isn’t the precision of the level. It’s the concept of broad participation.

The logic is simple: strong, healthy markets tend to be driven by more than just a handful of names. When 70% or more of the index is trending above its long-term average, it shows strength is spread across the field.

That’s what we’re after. Not perfection but broad participation.

So even if we’re sitting at 60% like we are now, it doesn’t automatically disqualify the rally.

It just means we need to dig deeper and understand where that strength is or isn’t showing up.

Sector-Level Breadth Tells a Different Story
The S&P 500 isn’t one thing. It’s 11 sectors, each with its own structure and sensitivity to the economic cycle. And when we break down % of stocks above their 200-day moving averages by sector, we get a clearer picture of the puzzle.

The Leaders
  • Industrials $XLI ( ▼ 0.22% )  : 79% – Classic cyclical leadership. Healthy participation.
  • Financials $XLF ( ▲ 0.06% )  : 76% – Impressive strength from a cyclical sector.
  • Technology $XLK ( ▼ 0.07% )  : 73% – Still participating broadly, not just mega caps.
  • Communication Services $XLC ( ▼ 0.46% )  : 70% – Holding firm.
  • Consumer Discretionary $XLY ( ▲ 0.89% )  : 70% – Another risk-on sector confirming.
That’s a strong core of offensive leadership - the kind of participation you expect in a Bull Market.

And then there’s Utilities $XLU ( ▲ 1.68% )  at 94%. On paper, that’s a defensive sector, but context matters. Utilities are now tied to AI infrastructure demand and power buildouts, not just yield-chasing. So it may be acting more cyclical than it looks. 

The Laggards
  • Materials $XLB ( ▲ 0.23% )  : 64% – Middle of the road, but not dragging.
  • Real Estate $XLRE ( ▲ 0.29% )  : 58% – Sensitive to rates, not surprising here.
  • Consumer Staples $XLP ( ▼ 0.27% )  : 47% – Weak participation, typical in risk-on tapes.
  • Energy $XLE ( ▼ 0.81% )  : 45% – Still digesting macro and commodity shifts.
  • Health Care $XLV ( ▼ 0.66% )  : 34% – Clearly risk-off positioning.

This is where the weakness in index-level breadth is coming from, not from the sectors that drive bull markets, but from the ones that typically hold up during corrections. .............


Getting Out Too Early


Applying iterative design to Musk's proposed zero deficit world

Anyone who thought that the falling out between Trump and Musk was staged got a wake-up call last week, when Musk announced that he was going to create a new political party–the America Party–to fight both the Republicans and the Democrats over government debt and deficits.

The dividing line between Trump and Musk is now clear. Musk thought that Trump was dedicated to eliminating the government deficit, but the “One Big Beautiful Bill” put paid to that. Though it slashed spending in many areas, it also increased the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, and it cut taxes on the rich by far more than it cut spending on the poor–thus increasing the deficit.

Trump was fine with that; Musk was livid. He is clearly determined to eliminate the deficit and reduce government debt. Since he believes that neither incumbent party will do it, he’s forming his own. ..........


El-Erian: Is America Breaking the Global Economy?
What an Age of Economic Uncertainty Will Mean for the World



This is a complete capitulation:
  • 15% tariffs on EU goods, 0% on US goods
  • EU to buy 750 billion dollars in LNG over the next 3 years (US LNG is more expensive than alternatives)
  • 600 billion EU investment in the US
  • 50% tariff on steel and aluminum to the US stays in place
  • A commitment to purchase huge amounts of US armaments
Japan has similarly capitulated, after previously standing firm.

Pathetic.

Ironically this leaves Canada as one of the only holdouts among America’s vassals. China, of course, has told the US to take a long flying leap off a short pier. ...........

What’s particularly interesting to me is the psychology of this. European elites are just so used to being vassals, and so completely without any pride (though they have plenty of vanity) that they are unable to stand up to America no matter what the humiliation. Russia was able to withstand far worse than what the US was doing, and even flourish, but Europeans can think of no way out but to capitulate. (To be sure, Russia had certain advantages the EU doesn’t have, but the reverse is true as well. The real issue is a lack of imagination and guts.) ...........

This capitulation has closed off one option: the third bloc. What could have happened is Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan and other affected nations forming a unified trade bloc of their own, and taking unified steps against America. Such a coalition would have won the ensuing trade war and could have cannibalized the US rather than the other way around. ........



............... The financial media lauded the tech results and even went along with the Trump administration’s claims that all the fears about the hit to US economic growth and inflation from Trump’s tariff measures had been proved wrong. 

But the more you look at the data below the stock market hype and Trump’s claims, the reality is much less rosy. Below the surface, large parts of corporate America are grappling with slowing profits and the uncertainty generated by Trump’s aggressive trade war. With almost two-thirds of S&P 500 companies having reported second-quarter results, earnings for consumer staples and materials companies are down 0.1 per cent and 5 per cent year on year, according to FactSet data. Indeed, 52 per cent of those S&P 500 companies to have posted results, have reported declining profit margins, according to Société Générale.



New offering promises DC plans access to real estate, farmland, infrastructure, and timber investments



Bubble Fare:


With our most reliable stock market valuation measures at the highest extremes in U.S. history, record negative readings on our most reliable “equity risk premium” gauge (estimated S&P 500 total returns vs. Treasury yields), and the narrowest junk bond risk premiums in history, it’s useful for investors to remember that a market crash is nothing but risk-aversion meeting a market that is not priced to tolerate risk. .....................

The core of our discipline remains straightforward: to align our investment stance with prevailing, measurable, observable market conditions, and to change our investment stance as those conditions change. No forecasts or scenarios are required. .......................



The Magnificent 7 stocks — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon — now make up around 35% of the value of the US stock market, and NVIDIA’s market value makes up about 19% of the Magnificent 7. The S&P 500 has never been more concentrated in a single stock than it is today, with Nvidia representing close to 8% of the index.

This is a hugely top heavy stock market, now at record levels, driven by just seven stocks and in particular, Nvidia, the company that is making all the processors needed by AI companies to develop their models.  If Nvidia’s revenue growth should weaken, that will put huge downward pressure on this highly overvalued stock market.  As Torsten Slok, chief economist at one of the largest investment institutions, put it: “The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s.” ...........

................... So huge investment of money and resources, astronomic payments to AI trainers, and massive data centers being constructed – with the AI hype driving the stock market to ever new heights – but so far, with no significant revenues raised and virtually no profits.  This is a repeat of the dot.com bubble on steroids. ............



.................... There are so many wild and noteworthy things about this milestone that it’s hard to know when to start.

First, let’s take a second to note the sheer insanity of these numbers. The first company to hit a $1 trillion valuation in the modern era was Apple, in 2018. Now, just seven years later, there are nine $1 trillion+ tech companies, and Google, Amazon, and Meta are soaring past $2 trillion, and now Apple is well past $3 trillion. Much of this expansion of value has occurred in just the last two years, on the back of the AI boom. Nvidia tripled its valuation, becoming the first-ever $4 trillion company in the process, in less than one year.

Second, note the source of Microsoft’s new investor enthusiasm: Like Nvidia, MS seems to be primarily benefitting from the AI boom by selling shovels during the gold rush. While Nvidia cornered the market on chips needed to run AI’s resource-intensive computation, Microsoft is winning by selling cloud compute in bulk. 

................... I’ll just repeat that. Over the last six months, capital expenditures on AI—counting just information processing equipment and software, by the way—added more to the growth of the US economy than all consumer spending combined. You can just pull any of those quotes out—spending on IT for AI is so big it might be making up for economic losses from the tariffs, serving as a private sector stimulus program.

To me, this is just screaming bubble. I’m sure I’m not alone. In fact I know I’m not alone. I’m thinking especially of Ed Zitron’s impassioned and thorough guide to the AI bubble; a rundown of how much money is being poured into and spent on AI vs how much money these products are making, and surprise, the situation as it stands is not sustainable. Worrying signs abound, and not least that so far, the companies benefitting most from AI are those selling the tools to simply build more of it (Nvidia, Microsoft), or who have monopolies through which they can force AI tools onto users en masse with limited repercussions (Google, Meta). ................



.................... Nevertheless, I am alarmed, and while I have said some of these things separately, based on recent developments, I think it's necessary to say why. 

In short, I believe the AI bubble is deeply unstable, built on vibes and blind faith, and when I say "the AI bubble," I mean the entirety of the AI trade.

And it's alarmingly simple, too.

But this isn’t going to be saccharine, or whiny, or simply worrisome. I think at this point it’s become a little ridiculous to not see that we’re in a bubble. We’re in a god damn bubble, it is so obvious we’re in a bubble, it’s been so obvious we’re in a bubble, a bubble that seems strong but is actually very weak, with a central point of failure.

I may not be a contrarian, but I am a hater. I hate the waste, the loss, the destruction, the theft, the damage to our planet and the sheer excitement that some executives and writers have that workers may be replaced by AI — and the bald-faced fucking lie that it’s happening, and that generative AI is capable of doing so.

And so I present to you — the Hater’s Guide to the AI bubble, a comprehensive rundown of arguments I have against the current AI boom’s existence. Send it to your friends, your loved ones, or print it out and eat it. ...............................................................................



With the GENIUS Act signed into law now we get to see if stablecoins can actually walk the walk, not just talk the talk. The story the stablecoin industry has told is one of payments innovation, particularly for international payments, with stablecoins poised to displace the expensive and ungainly wire transfer system. Is this right? ............

.............. I’m skeptical that there’s going to be much uptake, at least from larger businesses in developed countries. Here’s why. I talk with corporate treasury types from time to time. These are the folks who have to be convinced to use stablecoins if they are going to be anything other than a niche payment market for personal remittances and capital control evasion. From the perspective of many corporate treasury professionals, there’s little to commend the use of stablecoins. Sure, wire transfers are problematic, but stablecoins bring with them a host of other operational problems. ...............


… by blowing up and looting DeFi to enrich TradFi

.......................... Bear that phrase in mind: “a crypto treasury company” as I walk you through the process whereby libertarian, de-regulated crypto has met its nemesis: rampant, and corrupt financialised capitalism. In short, Wall Street and the White House.

It all began with Stablecoins

…. like Tether and USD Coin, which like so much about crypto, are not coins. Instead they are the digital currency used in a discredited Hayekian and unregulated system known as ’narrow banking’ or full reserve banking. As Gary B Gorton and Jeffery Y. Zhang argue in an excellent paper Taming Wildcat Stablecoins Stablecoins have no intrinsic value. Instead, like the unregulated banks of old, they are currency used by platforms to facilitate exchanges and like banks manage transactions between different cryptocurrency buyers and sellers and between crypto buyers and sellers of US dollars. (There are now more than 15 million different cryptocurrencies, according to price-tracking website CoinMarketCap). To facilitate those transactions Stablecoin platforms issue a form of ‘fiat currency’ (the Stablecoin) which is new, private money creation.

Owners of Stablecoins can “pledge them in decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms that (allegedly) provide interest rates that far exceed the yield that retail investors can obtain” via TradFi (Traditional Finance) - like a bank savings account” write Gorton and Zhang.

Are Stablecoins stable?

Their claim to be stable, and therefore reliable for those wishing to exchange their cryptocurrency for another cryptocurrency or for US dollars, is based on the assertion that Stablecoin’s value does not deviate from the assets they hold; assets that back up the currency. Those assets (or collateral) are mainly short-term US Treasuries, or US government debt.

Back in the 1830s in the United States, unregulated ‘narrow’ banks issued bank notes and arranged transactions in much the same way as Stablecoin platforms do today. In exercising the power to create new money, they would claim falsely, that all the banknotes issued were fully backed by gold stacked in their vaults, or in the vaults of partner banks.The implication was that the notes could be exchanged for gold. ...........................



...................... The dream of the techno enthusiasts that cryptocurrencies would replace state-issued currencies like the dollar or the euro and so free individuals from the ‘heavy hand of state regulation’ in a new free world of money has never materialised.  Instead, what has happened is that the mega financial institutions have taken over control of these currencies and are turning them into what they hope will be a highly profitable set of financial assets to suck in investors. .................................



PE Fare:






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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.

Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” ....................................................................................................................................................

If the drying continues — and the researchers warn that it is now nearly impossible to reverse “on human timescales” — it heralds “potentially staggering” and cascading risks for global order. The majority of the earth’s population lives in the 101 countries that the study identified as losing fresh water, making up not just North America, Europe and North Africa but also much of Asia, the Middle East and South America. This suggests the middle band of Earth is becoming less habitable. It also correlates closely with the places that a separate body of climate research has already identified as a shrinking environmental niche that has suited civilization for the past 6,000 years. Combined, these findings all point to the likelihood of widespread famine, the migration of large numbers of people seeking a more stable environment and the carry-on impact of geopolitical disorder.

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, lauded the new report for confirming trends that were once theoretical. The ramifications, he said, could be profoundly destabilizing. “The massive overpumping of groundwater,” Gleick said, “poses enormous risk to food production.” And food, he pointed out, is the foundation for stability.  .............................................


Global warming may create a "permanent El Nino", changing the world's weather patterns

Scientists are warning that global warming is disrupting the natural rhythm of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), potentially creating the conditions for a type of “permanent El Niño” climate state, with significant consequences for global weather patterns, food security, more extreme storms and putting large ecosystems in danger.

A study published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment in April found that “the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes are now in a permanent El Niño-like state” due to rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and hotter-than-ever oceans.

ENSO, a naturally recurring climate pattern originating in the tropical Pacific Ocean, alternates between El Niño, La Niña and neutral phases. However, this cyclical behaviour is increasingly being distorted by anthropogenic climate change. .............



In two recent posts I’ve discussed the steaming mess of confusion, hypocrisy, and genuine trouble that goes under the label “global climate change.” As I pointed out in those essays, yes, the climate is changing. Yes, emissions from our smokestacks and tailpipes are part, though only part, of the reason. No, we’re not facing a world-ending catastrophe. No, pouring more money into solar panels and wind turbines—manufactured using fossil fuels, from raw materials mined, refined, and shipped using fossil fuels, and transported, built, maintained, and decommissioned using fossil fuels, to produce an intermittent trickle of green energy—won’t do any more to change the trajectory of the climate than the last twenty years of that same tactic have done. What’s that saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results? 

We can sum up neatly the issues surrounding global climate change today by saying that it started out as a problem but has turned into a predicament. Longtime readers of my essays will recall that one of the very early posts I made online, all the way back in 2006, focused on the distinction between those two terms. It’s really quite simple: it’s possible to solve a problem, at least potentially, but a predicament has no solutions. All you can do is adapt to it. What gives this distinction teeth is that problems can turn into predicaments if they’re ignored or neglected too long, or if the changes that would be needed to solve them are outside the bounds of what the society in question is prepared to face.

To borrow one of Groucho Marx’s famous turns of phrase, we resemble that last remark. ...........



The IEA opens its Electricity 2025 report by declaring we’re entering “a New Age of Electricity.” That’s nonsense. The agency has become a dishonest broker, pushing unrealistic renewable narratives. It may be time for the U.S. to reconsider its participation.

A “New Age of Electricity,” if it truly existed, would involve more than just incremental growth in electric power demand. It would mark a fundamental transformation in how societies produce, distribute, and consume energy—on a scale comparable to the industrial revolution or the post-war fossil boom. That’s not happening now, and there’s little evidence it will happen anytime soon.

The IEA bases its “new age” claim on global electricity demand increasing more than 4% annually through 2027. What it doesn’t tell you is that total energy demand is also growing—and electricity’s share only rises about 0.5% per year, according to its own data.  That’s not a new age—it’s just aggressive marketing masquerading as analysis. ..............



.................................
If we were not in overshoot, the environment would not be degrading so severely: massive loss of insects, mammals, acidifying oceans, climate change, rain water that isn’t safe to drink, etc, etc… We’re eating into the carrying capacity of the Earth, producing more than the Earth can sustainably produce, and damaging the Earth in ways which will take ages to fix. Some of them, like loss of biodiversity, are not fixable on any human lifespan.

So, since we can’t leave, and since we can’t get enough resources from space to matter, and since we’re destroying environment that makes our survival possible along with drawing down resources at a ferocious rate, we’re in overshoot.




The greatest threat to our civilization — and to the planet — isn’t climate change, fossil fuels, or failing ecosystems. It’s the way we think.

We are trapped in a reductionist mindset, always searching for a single cause, a single villain, and a single solution. This way of thinking, rooted in left-hemisphere dominance, is not ancient but relatively recent. It took hold with the rise of writing, mathematics, the wheel, and the horse — technologies that convinced us we could conquer complexity through control. We came to believe that cleverness could substitute for wisdom, and reductionism for holistic understanding. That mistake brought us to our current predicament. Still, we search for the silver bullet, the technology, the market mechanism to save us.

But no such solution is coming. The reckoning has already begun, and there is little left to do that will change the outcome. Climate change is only the most visible symptom. The real crisis is that we are reality-blind.

My friends Nate Hagens and DJ White wrote a book called Reality Blind a few years ago. They show how modern civilization is fundamentally out of touch with the physical, biological, and energy realities that govern the world. Their core message is this: our predicament is not just about climate or energy or economics — it is about the stories we tell ourselves, the systems we’ve built on those stories, and our collective inability to see and accept physical and ecological limits.  ..............

..................... Psychologically, we are unprepared. As Jung understood, humanity remains immature — fragmented, projecting, in denial. Iain McGilchrist reminds us that our cultural dominance by left-hemisphere thinking blinds us to systems, context, and consequence. We fixate on measurements, not meaning; on solutions, not relationships. Without inner integration, there is no outer action. Quantum Decision Theory shows how belief systems persist in contradiction until reality forces collapse. Climate denial, techno-optimism, and greenwashing all function as suspended states of belief, awaiting the hard feedback of reality. .....................

................ Many who listen and even agree still say the message is too depressing to face. I understand — but I disagree. Society’s behavior over the past 200 years has been out of control. Forget climate change and overshoot for a moment. Look at the trash, the plastic, the pollution, the rising suicide and mental illness, the debt, the wars, the division, the financial instability. These aren’t signs of a threat to come — they’re symptoms of a civilization already in decline. The unraveling isn’t in the future; it’s here. Acknowledging this isn’t despair, it’s clarity. Only by seeing reality as it is can we begin to make different choices. Denial feels safer, but it leaves us powerless. Acceptance opens the door to agency, meaning, and adaptation.

Humans are capable of both destruction and wisdom. Like an addict on the brink of recovery, one way of life is ending painfully — but another remains possible on the other side. ............



Sci Fare:

The next generation of deep-brain stimulation automatically corrects the precise brain waves that create symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Can this approach target other conditions?





........................... A striking outcome of the analysis revealed a significantly elevated risk for several neuropsychiatric conditions within six months following COVID-19 diagnosis. Among these, anxiety disorders and mood disturbances surfaced prominently, pointing to the profound psychological burden exerted by the virus. Additionally, the study identified increased incidences of cognitive impairments, including what is popularly termed “brain fog,” as well as cases of psychotic disorders, indicating a multifaceted impact on mental health.

Beyond psychological effects, the investigation delved into neurological manifestations that have been increasingly reported throughout the pandemic. The data highlighted notable surges in cerebrovascular events such as ischemic strokes and transient ischemic attacks, potentially linked to the prothrombotic state induced by SARS-CoV-2 infection. Moreover, peripheral neuropathies and other neurological sequelae were noted, suggesting widespread neuroinflammatory processes triggered by the virus. ............


Patients look healthy on paper. Two years later, they're high-risk again.

........... Now, while everyone else obsessed over AI (shocking, I know), I was laser-focused on GLP-1s. One throwaway comment during a private equity panel sent me down a rabbit hole on insurance companies grappling with the weight-loss drug explosion.

The downstream effects are completely fascinating and completely overlooked. I spent the rest of the conference hunting down insurance people who were all asking the same question: how the hell do we deal with this?

Turns out, they have good reason to panic. ....................

Insurers call this type of screw-up "mortality slippage."

Mortality slippage means accidentally classifying someone as lower-risk than they actually are. It's ridiculously expensive. ....................





U.S. B.S.:

Curtis Yarvin On the Need to Cross the Rubicon, Epstein As a Wild Goose Chase, A New Leftist Anti-Globalization Movement?, Greater Turkey/Turania?, The Banker Who Caused the 1929 Stock Crash

........ The fact of the matter is that the political situation in the USA is BORING at present, and when politics are boring, the only conclusion that can come from it is that things are “stable”. The eight years of media-driven infoterror that coloured the first Trump administration and the Biden gerontocracy that succeeded it simply ran out of energy. It is very difficult to get passionate about budget cuts or trade talks….unless you are some sort of nerd/wonk. The USA is a very stable polity at present, and this fact should upset those who supported Trump in 2016, 2020, and yes, 2024 as well. Trump was elected to usher in a revolution (even if smarter types knew that this is an impossible ask), not govern in accordance with the menu on display.

It is this present incongruous situation that makes Trump v2.0 rather dull to observe. #MAGA by and large wants a revolution, but The Donald is a 1990s Clinton liberal. ...............

When I reflect on the past nine years of US politics, I am left scratching my head, wondering what all the fuss about Trump really was. Was it all a negative reaction to his brash personality and style? The cacophony of the reaction of his first time in office did not match his actual policy. We know that “Trump-Russia” is bullshit, we also know that Russian meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Election was also nonsense. I still can’t figure out what was really behind the psychological breakdown of US elites in 2016 through to the Biden era (and some still haven’t recovered to this day). .............


The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release

It was a cover-up. .....................

........ It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story, probably the last in a long line, as neither Bill nor Hillary will have careers when it’s finished, if they stay out of jail. Characteristically, the most powerful political family since the Kennedys won’t just bring many individuals down with them, but whole institutions, as the FBI, the CIA, the presidency of Barack Obama, and a dozen or so of the most celebrated brands in commercial media will see their names blackened forever through association with this idiotic caper. A fair number of those media companies should (and likely will) go out of business.

............. I’ve tiptoed for years around what I believed to be true about this case, worrying some mitigating fact might emerge.

Now, there’s no doubt.

Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it. It was a cover-up, plain and simple... ...................



This week, Washington was rocked by new releases in the declassification of material related to the origins of the Russian investigation. The material shows further evidence of a secret plan by the Clinton campaign to use the FBI and media to spread a false claim that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. With this material, the public is finally seeing how officials and reporters set into motion what may be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated in American politics. There never was a Russian collusion conspiracy. This is the emerging story of the real Russian conspiracy to manufacture a false narrative that succeeded in devouring much of the first term of the Trump Administration.

What is emerging in these documents is a political illusion carefully constructed by government officials and a willing media.

The brilliance of the trick was getting reporters to buy into the illusion; to own it like members of an audience called to the stage by an illusionist. .................

........................ The media (including the Washington Post and New York Times, which won Pulitzer prizes for reporting on the debunked claims) are apoplectic in dismissing these disclosures. The last thing they will do is report on how they helped sell a political hoax. The problem is that they never said it was a trick. They said it was the truth. That is why they cannot honestly cover the story. To do so would not be coverage, it would be a confession.

It appears that everyone was in on the trick: the U.S. government, the media, even foreign governments. The only chumps were the American people. Now they are about to see how it was done.



Geopolitical Fare:

“With apologies for bluntness, the mainstream press fucked around, now the mainstream press is finding out.” - Matt Taibbi

By now, it must be kind of obvious that Mr. Putin of Russia was staged-up into a demon for the convenience of Hillary Clinton — resulting in a decade of deformed US foreign relations that has dragged us to the edge of a third world war.

Nice work, Democratic Party!

I will proffer a harsh truth to you: the best outcome in Ukraine would be for Russia to win the war as expeditiously as possible, neutralize and disarm the place, change-out its illegitimate government, and let it revert to being the frontier backwater it was for eight decades previous, when it was not a problem for the other nations of the region.

Mr. Putin has put up with our country’s psychotic nonsense with remarkable patience.

The idea that he seeks to conquer western Europe was a preposterous confection of the neocon crazies in our State Department and Intel “community.”

The long game for the neocon crazies has been to use NATO as the instrument to break up Russia and gain control of its resources. This was after Secretary of State James Baker told Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, in discussions over German reunification, that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” Starting in 1999 with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, sixteen additional nations were induced to join NATO, encroaching on Russia’s borders, with new military bases and missiles. It was a stupid game.

And it failed. Ukraine was the final gambit. The US destabilized it on purpose in 2014, installed a series of governments we could control, made it a ward of US taxpayers, sprinkled it with bio-weapons labs and money laundries, and gave Mr. Zelenskyy the go-ahead to start shelling the Donbas provinces adjacent to Russia. After years of that, Mr. Putin moved to stop it in 2022. The development of drone weapons, along with US-based satellite targeting tech, has prolonged the war. But, of course, the Russians, too, have modernized their own weapons arsenal to match that. The current state of things is a slow Russian grind to defeat a Ukraine that has run out of available fighting men and is apparently short of all weapons besides its drones. ..........



............... Everything said above is correct. I’d add that China is not an existential threat to Canada. They have never threatened our sovereignty the way Trump and the US has, and they never will. They cannot conquer us and are not stupid enough to believe they could, we are too large and too far away.

Of course we’ll have to kiss China’s ass if we want to move towards them. We’ve been very hostile for the last decade or so (we were friendly before that, it’s a policy change made by Trudeau).

I can’t see that kissing China’s ass is any more obnoxious than the deep tongue action we’ve been applying to America’s behind since 1984, with only a brief interregnum under Prime Minister Chretien (who used lips only.) In fact, China is likely to demand a lot less ................. 

Canada has three main geopolitical problems:

1) How to disentangle ourselves from America without getting invaded or economically crushed; and,
2) how to regrow our manufacturing capacity, so as to not become a 21st century Argentinian-style basket-case.
3) How not to go down with America.

................. It’s interesting to see that Canada’s elites are beginning to realize the bind. There is zero chance the Globe And Mail article would have been published if there weren’t powerful people in Canada who want the shift.


A brief primer on why the American empire exists, how it works, and Europe's place in it.

Whenever I talk about things like tariffs, Trump supporters appear in my comments to tell me that Europe has gotten a free ride for long enough and that it is time we learned to pay our way. I find it a little frustrating to read this, because in Europe it does not feel like we are getting a free ride at all. In fact it seems like the opposite: The most common complaint on the populist German right is that our political class refuses to represent our interests and will not stop carrying water for the Americans.

I recognise that I’ll never be able to put this right, but it’s worth trying, because it is important to understand the world as it is. The truth is that the United States is an imperial power. Generally speaking, it does not give foreign nations free rides and it does not hand out unearned favours. There is however a lot of confusion here, because hardly anybody bothers to describe honestly the geopolitical strategy pursued by the United States or the nature of the American empire. Western liberalism cannot conceptualise imperial politics, and while empire generally benefits political elites on both sides of the Atlantic, it is not necessarily or always in the interests of ordinary Americans or ordinary Europeans, which is yet another reason not to talk about it. ..............



The mass atrocity in Gaza is a genocide, obviously, and is an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

But it’s also a lot more than that.

It’s an experiment — to see what kinds of abuses the public will accept without causing significant disruption to the imperial status quo.

It’s a psychological operation — to push out the boundaries of what’s normal and acceptable in our minds so that we will consent to even more horrific abuses in the future.

It’s a symptom — of Zionism, of colonialism, of militarism, of capitalism, of western supremacism, of empire-building, of propaganda, of ignorance, of apathy, of delusion, of ego. ..............



For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death. There is clear evidence of deliberate intent going back to 2023. This clearly warrants charges of genocide. .............

.......................... In recent months, the political establishment in both Europe and the US has become “troubled” by images of Palestinian children dying of hunger. In reaction, they resort to grotesque euphemism to avoid the obvious fact that what is happening in Gaza is the result not of “crisis” but of deliberate Israeli policy.

...................... Anyone deflecting from the clear responsibility of the Israeli state for this mass starvation of two million people, anyone resorting to euphemisms about “crises” makes themselves complicit in this historic crime.


Always Too Late, Never Sorry, Never Learning

In Europe, Ukraine is run by a moody, narcissistic, and devious drug addict president, who is overstaying his term limit and has installed the most corrupt and authoritarian regime of all the country’s leaders since independence in 1991 (yes, including the infamous Viktor Yanukovich). And that is a tough field to compete in. The reason Volodymyr Zelensky has been able to outdo all his predecessors in vicious destructiveness is that he has been a sometimes obstreperous yet fundamentally obedient puppet of the West, while the latter has pursued an insane scheme to crush Russia by using up Ukraine. Ukraine has been used up indeed, but Russia, fortunately, has not been crushed but become even stronger.

In Western Asia (still usually misnamed the Middle East), things are even worse, as hard as that may be to imagine. But leave it to Israel to always go an extra mile (and then another one and yet another one) in genuinely satanic evil (to quote the sober and correct assessment of the card-carrying atheist Norman Finkelstein). Gaza, the target of genocide and ethnic cleansing for now almost three years, is being starved systematically by the Jewish-supremacist fascist (aka Zionist) genocidal apartheid colonial-settler death cult masquerading as a state. Israel, too, can only carry out and get away with its many, constant crimes because it enjoys massive support and impunity thanks to the co-genocidal West.

(And let’s not forget that Gaza is not Israel’s only currently ongoing crime: there also is the terror and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, the destruction of Syria, the battering of Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen, and, of course, as always the systematic subversion of the politics and public spheres of every country in the West to shield all these atrocities.)

No, none of the above has yet been acknowledged by the mainstream West. And maybe that will never happen. Or, if so, then in about a 100 to 200 years when even the very last conformist will feel save enough to face reality. But what we have seen recently are (very) partial admissions that stories told only yesterday by the West’s and Israel’s mainstream politicians and media are – shock, shock! – untrue. We are observing multiple, herdlike shifts from the virtually unconditional – and aggressive – asserting of obvious propaganda to a form of opportunistic reputational hedging.

In the case of the Gaza Genocide, Western talking heads such as Omer Bartov, Bob Geldof, Ross Douthat, Piers Morgan, and Matthew Iglesias and mainstream media outlets such as Der Spiegel and the New York Times are realizing that they have been on the side of what the Spanish prime minister has correctly called, the greatest crime (at least as of yet) of our 21st century. ................

............... Its essence is the implicit but clear claim “We are not late at all. We are just in time. Because before we deigned to notice, nothing worth noticing was happening.”

Take, for example, a post by Matthew Yglesias, reliable indicator of mediocrity-and-less. Promoting fellow sleepyhead Ross Douthat, Yglesias praised him – and thus, himself and the whole herd, of course – for “changing your mind when the facts change.” Only one problem, the facts have not changed.

Gaza was rightly called the “world’s largest concentration camp ever” by Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in 2003; it has been under merciless siege and blockade since 2006, interspersed with massacres; in late 2023, the Israeli perpetrators were loud and clear about starting a genocide with the final aim of ethnic cleansing. Since then they have shown us every single day and night they meant every word of it. Nothing “has changed.” Except that the media and propaganda co-perpetrators of this genocide and the many who have been accomplices by cowardly silence are getting cold feet.

Yglesias and his ilk do not interest me. But their effect is toxic. For this lie – resembling that of many Germans, by the way, who also claimed to have only ever learned about their country’s holocaust once it was too late – prevents learning. We must face a lesson from how long it has taken for so many to even acknowledge a small part of the horrible truth. And if we allow them to pretend that there was nothing to acknowledge before they started doing so, then we allow them not only to cynically once again to disregard and insult the victims and to escape the ostracism they really deserve (as a bare minimum). We also allow them to make us all dumber, once again. So that next time many can fall again for Centrist Time Brain Syndrome: Always too late, never sorry, and never even trying to learn to do better.


"You want history books to not record you as an evil genocide supporter?" said one organizer. "You need to actually make an impact, NOW."

......................................... One observer said Clinton and a number of European leaders are speaking out now because Israel has already "carried out their final solution."

As Common Dreams reported this week, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has said that 85% of people in Gaza are now in Phase 5 of famine, defined at "an extreme deprivation of food."



We’re back at the part of the news cycle where Israel tells the world it’s going to allow a bit more aid into Gaza in order to mollify its allies and reduce the public outcry as images of starving children draw objections from the west.

This is just Israel giving the Kier Starmers and Anthony Albaneses of the western world just enough of an excuse to go silent about the starvation of Gaza again. They will then continue starving Gaza. This psychopathic python-like suffocation tactic is how Israel has gotten Gaza to the point it’s at now. .............

❖

The worst thing Donald Trump has ever done is commit genocide in Gaza. Everything else pales in comparison. He could end the Gaza holocaust with a phone call just like Biden could have, and he hasn’t. For that reason alone he deserves to die in a cage. ...............

❖

Today I got my first comment telling me I was wrong to oppose Israel in October 2023 but now I’m right because things have changed. I expect to receive many more such comments going forward as people navigate the difficult cognitive dissonance terrain of realizing they’ve been wrong this entire time.



They’re doing it right in front of us. Right in front of us.

So many people have dedicated their entire lives working to expose the criminality of the empire, and then the empire comes right out and commits a live-streamed genocide right in front of us.

Whistleblowers. Investigative journalists. Authors. Documentarians. Conspiracy analysts. Peace activists. Their whole lives devoted to the task of uncovering the crimes of the undeclared empire we live under and drawing attention to them, saying “Look! See?? We really are ruled by monsters!” Only for the monsters to come right out and intentionally starve children to death on all our screens all around the world.

People like me are almost redundant at this current point in history. I’ve been writing about the depravity of the empire for years, thousands of articles and millions of words, and I’ve never said anything that illuminates the reality of our situation nearly as well as the fact that western governments and media have openly colluded with Israel to exterminate a group of innocent people because they’re the wrong ethnicity.  ...............



................................ As western pundits, politicians and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.

People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day? .........................

................................................. That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.

And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet. .....................................



As Israel and its supporters continue to lose control of the narrative around the world with more and more people awakening to the reality that a genocide is taking place in Gaza, I’m seeing the resurrection of a talking point that western Israel apologists have been trying to make work off and on since this mass atrocity began.

“What was Israel supposed to do in response to October 7?” they ask confidently, taking it as a given that there is no possible answer to this brilliant checkmate question besides “Rain vast quantities of military explosives on a giant concentration camp full of children and deliberately starve a civilian population using siege warfare.”

But the real problem is that they are asking the wrong question.

A much more useful and interesting question than “What was Israel supposed to do in response to October 7?” is “What were Palestinians supposed to do in response to all of Israel’s abuses prior to October 7?” ...........................

....................... Those who suggest that everything Israel is doing in Gaza can be explained by October 7 have got it exactly backwards: everything we’re seeing in Gaza explains why October 7 happened in the first place.

The sadism and psychopathy we’re witnessing in Gaza didn’t magically appear 22 months ago; everyone in Gaza has been experiencing Israel’s abusiveness in various manifestations throughout their entire lives.

Israel has always been this way. October 7 just gave it the excuse to completely unleash its genocidal impulses.




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