Wednesday, June 29, 2022

Rules Based Oligarchy

 Subjects of Empire,


  I include this story as a perspective piece. This same ruling oligarchy remains in power today, after 54 years of consolidating that power. 
RFK Jr is like his Dad, but 26 years older than dad lived to be. He knows all of this information. He fights honorably for truth, knowing that he may "die funny" some day.

​  ​New Evidence Implicates CIA, LAPD, FBI and Mafia as Plotters in Elaborate “Hit” Plan to Prevent RFK From Ever Reaching White House
..In a 2018 interview with The Washington Post, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said that he traveled to meet with Sirhan at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional facility in San Diego County, and, after a relatively lengthy conversation, believed that Sirhan did not kill his father and that a second gunman was involved.
​  ​Kennedy Jr.’s view is shared by his sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, and by Paul Schrade, regional director of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and one of Bobby’s closest advisers, who was shot the night that he was killed.
​  ​In 2016, Schrade testified in support of Sirhan’s parole, stating his belief that a second shooter killed Kennedy and that Sirhan was intended to be a distraction from the real gunman by an unknown conspiracy.
​  ​Kennedy Jr. has pointed out that Sirhan’s appointed lawyer at his original trial, Grant Cooper, was Johnny Rosselli’s personal lawyer. “Roselli,” he said, “was the mobster who ran the assassination program for the CIA against Castro. Cooper pressured Sirhan to plead guilty so that there was no trial.”
​  ​Kennedy believes the real assassin was Thane Eugene Cesar, an employee of Lockheed’s Burbank facility—which manufactured the CIA produced U-2 spy plane—and previously Hughes Aircraft who was moonlighting as a security guard for Ace Security Services.
After the shooting, Kennedy Sr. was photographed with Cesar’s clip-on tie next to him, which he had apparently yanked off.

​Pepe Escobar makes increasingly unflattering (to the west) comparisons:​
Behind the Tin Curtain: BRICS+ vs NATO/G7
..there now exists what should be called a Tin Curtain, fabricated by the fearful, clueless, collective west, via G7 and NATO: this time, to essentially contain the integration of the Global South...

​This is what a "good day" looks like for NATO these days.
​  Hours after Turkey’s announcement yesterday that it would support Finland’s and Sweden’s accession to NATO, Alliance Secretary – General Jens Stoltenberg called this morning (Wednesday) at the annual conference in Madrid to unite and expedite the process of joining. At the same time, he attacked Russia and China, claiming that Russia posed a “direct threat” to NATO.

Understanding the New York Times Article on the CIA in Ukraine
​  ​When you read some so-called bombshell report dishing the dirt on some Top Secret U.S. operation in the New York Times or the Washington Post, you need to understand that this was not the result of some intrepid, eager beaver reporter who took the initiative and came up with a nifty idea for a story. Such stories are based on official or sanctioned leaks and always have an ulterior motive...
​..​Got that? The most acute problem is that the best Ukrainian troops are dead, wounded or captured. There are no first rate troops left to train
Oh my. That is a problem and the United States is not going to put any of our troops into harms way. 
That is, for now, the Biden Administration’s policy. 
Putting “modern special operations teams” on the ground to train Ukrainians is, per the NY Times piece, too great a risk and carries a price that is not worth the outcome.

The same American families who liked Hitler so well, like the Bushes and Harrimans, are still our oligarchs. Western financiers and industrialists took-down the Tsar  by funding the insurrectionists and the Bolsheviks, but "lost" Russia to Stalin during WW-2. 
They need Russia's vast resources now, more than ever, as western finance implodes.
Lavrov gets it right by comparing European Union and NATO to Hitler’s old Axis

​Ilargi at The Automatic Earth:  The Entire World Order Has Changed
..And we now know that they won’t be BRICS for much longer. Many countries choose to be affiliated, in one form or another, with the BRICS rather than the “west”. They see that Russia is winning in Ukraine, and they see the damage the sanctions do. It’s just practical considerations. Saudi Arabia and Argentina are interested in joining BRICS. So are Uruguay, Iran, Egypt, Thailand, and a number of post-Soviet States. They see where the real economic power resides.
  It’s amusing to see that for this week’s G7 in Germany, the host country has “invited the leaders of India, Indonesia, Senegal, Argentina and South Africa to the summit..” They will not join the G7 instead of the BRICS. Why would they? The world is moving away from unipolar US/NATO power. And as Russia and China have repeatedly said, this move is irreversible. It’s all because of what happens in Ukraine. 
​  ​The west is losing militarily AND economically.

EU Says Africa Should Stop Buying Russian Fertilizer -- But Can't Make It Themselves

​   This shouldn't be a problem. It's not like we're at war with anybody that can cut off our oil, is it?​
(Well, just as a thought problem, what would happen if outside supplies of oil to the US were stopped?)
US Emergency Oil Reserves Tumble To Record Low 27 Days Worth Of Supply

​It's not just about "weapons", but about covertly adjusting the brain function of billions of humans​ in order to manipulate them (us).
​Spartacus : ​The Weaponization of Biotech​  
The unregulated advancement of biotech is creating a new arms race and threatening our personal autonomy

​What do Germany, Switzerland and Taiwan have in common this year?
Igor Chudov, Depopulation of Taiwan   Birth Rate Dropped by 23% in ONE YEAR -- And it is NOT Covid
​  ​This is a continuation of my post from yesterday about a massive 13% decline in births in Germany. Such a decline is a nine-sigma event, meaning that it is so unlikely to occur by chance, that it would naturally happen as rarely as an asteroid striking the Earth.

Dramatic Decline in Births in Germany(and Taiwan, Belgium, Switzerland, North Dakota)​
​..​If this is happening in Q1 in Germany after a MINORITY of 18-49 yo were vaccinated in Q2 2021, what will happen in subsequent quarters? 
Will the birth rate decline even further?

​Swiss Policy Research noticed that same bar graph of live births in Switzerland. 
(The Pfizer study data aboutvaccine-study-participant miscarriages ceased to be recorded after a sudden early rise. Poof. Not writing that down any more.)
Covid Vaccines and Fertility
​  ​Why is there a substantial decrease in births in Germany, Switzerland, and other countries – nine months after the beginning of covid mass vaccinations?
​  ​Do covid vaccines impact male or female fertility?
​  ​An Israeli study recently published in the scientific journal Andrology seemed to have found a 15% decrease in sperm concentration three months after mRNA covid vaccination. The authors argued the decrease was temporary, but the data didn’t actually show a recovery...

Pfizer, Moderna COVID Vaccines May Increase Risk of Infection, Study Shows
A peer-reviewed study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows two doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine yield negative protection against symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, while previous infection without vaccination offers about 50% immunity.


​Coming this summer:
Omicron BA.5 Prefers Hypervaccinated Masking West Germans, Avoids the Former DDR
  Vaccine failure in one map
  East Germans have direct experience with government propaganda, and have proven more resistant to the vaccination campaign than Westerners. Their reward, after being much maligned by state media, is now higher levels of natural immunity and lower rates of BA.5 infection, which appears to prefer vaccinated populations.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/omicron-ba5-prefers-hypervaccinated


Pfizer Documents show Pfizer made its vaccine appear more effective than it was
​  ​JikkyLeaks claimed that data contained inside the massive Pfizer Documents release shows their vaccine had close to zero efficacy even when it launched. There is some correcting of the raw data required to reach this conclusion, but the raw data alone hints at an efficacy of 53%. The data contradicts Pfizer’s published claims the vaccine was 95% effective... 
​..​At least one other researcher has publicly reached the same results using data contained in the court-ordered Pfizer documents. I have already verified that the data exists, and using very simple public code, that the numbers add up to what Josh and Jikky claim.

If you never look, you can't be convicted of knowably hiding evidence of harm to Americans. (Is this a premeditated ignorance-defense?)
CDC Admits It Never Monitored VAERS for COVID Vaccine Safety Signals
 
In response to a Freedom of Information Request submitted by Children’s Health Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week admitted it never analyzed the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System for safety signals for COVID-19 vaccines.

If you have kept your kids un-"vaccinated" thus far, they have almost certainly had one of the COVID variants by now.
COVID-19: Preliminary Israeli study finds natural immunity in youth infected
​  ​In the largest worldwide study on unvaccinated children and teens, researchers found those who had been previously infected with COVID had a natural immunity between 80% and 89% for 18 months.


Naturally Immune
(pictured with Jenny, married 37 years)


Sunday, June 26, 2022

Economic Truths

 Trickled Upon,


  Driving to Yoakum with Jenny, Friday night, I was thinking that we need an economics based on facts, something with more predictive-value than "the Fed's got your back", which is the rationale of the risk-asset Ponzi scheme instituted in early 2009. 
Any workable economic model has to be based upon the actual "costs" of energy, since energy powers all production, communication, storage and transportation.

  Energy "costs" are presently expressed in monetary terms, but money verges upon "undefined". Energy extraction costs energy. The EROI (energy return on energy invested) used to be as high as 100:1 for crude oil in the USA in the 1930s. For tar sands in Canada and Venezuela it is now about 3:1 , whereas it may be above 30 for some of the easily-extracted oil in Iran and Iraq. It is about 10:1 for wind and solar, though other problems with timing, transmission and network costs arise. Coal has an EROI of around 46, which is lower due to cheap strip mining, even though the quality of the coal keeps declining. This paper goes into EROI as an analytic tool for energy sources. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513003856

  Economy runs on the energy remaining after energy is "produced" in a directly usable form, like electricity or diesel fuel, which are high quality energy for manufacturing and transportation. 3 times as much coal is needed to put into a generator, which must exist and be maintained, to get one energy unit of electricity. Natural gas generation plants can turn on and off faster to keep the grid up when demand is high, but the plants still need to be made and maintained at significant cost. Europe has been used to high quality Russian oil and gas, for which their economy and infrastructure is specialized. They will have a higher cost using energy from other sources, due to transport and mismatch to infrastructure.

  The energy costs of building solar cells and wind turbines are borne by fossil-fuel and mining economy. Neodymium, a rare-earth element, needed for efficient magnets in motors and generators, is very destructive to mine and refine. The environmental cost of a Toyota Prius or Nissan Leaf exceeds that of a Toyota Matrix over its lifetime of use, which is fairly well reflected in its inclusive lifetime cost. This is a case where monetary cost does reflect environmental and embedded-energy ("Emergy") costs.

  I have often returned to this theme that we should invest any surplus of wealth we now have into things which will help provide for our needs in the future of less and more expensive fuel. I addressed this in "Surplus Energy Economy" July 4, 2020.  https://www.johndayblog.com/2020/07/surplus-energy-economy.html
The article was from "Surplus Energy Economics" blog, which I last referenced on the 5th of this month https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/crystal-ball  .

  I'll be referring to this blog more frequently, as it provides the best analytical model for economics that I have been able to find, even though it is much less worked out than classical, or "neo-classical", "neoliberal" economics. Classical economics did look at efficiency of social-economy and valued the reduction of value extraction through "rent collection". "Neoclassical" and "neoliberal" economic models say that rent-collection is just as valuable as growing wheat; no-difference, nd that money-moving in credit card debt penalty charges is of the same economic value as money moving for natural gas to power kitchen stoves and on-demand electrical power plants for peak-load. 

  The predictive value of neoliberal economics is worse than nothing, because it is based upon a false and misleading premise, which has always been supported by rent-collecting wealth-interests, the "Rentier" capitalists. "GDP", gross domestic product replaced "GNP", gross national product, which was a manufacturing index,based on industrial production. Gross National Product would have better reflected classical economic theory if it had subtracted rents from industrial outputs, but at least it didn't add them in as wealth-created.

  Thermoeconomics has long been used in industrial processes like making-cement and refining oil. We can look at broad thermoeconomic  predictions more effectively than we can look at narrow specifics, except when we get to completely narrowed specifics in the efficiencies of a particular manufacturing process.

"In The Eye Of The Perfect Storm" is the latest primer from Surplus Energy Economics.

  Industrial economy, "real economy" has "gone into reverse". It is not just growing more slowly. It has begun contracting, despite infusion of debt-money, which is promises made on future economic production. Future economic production is estimated to keep growing at 3.5% per year after it gets past the current bad patches of COVID-pandemic and War-in-Ukraine, but that 3.5% growth is already a false assessment. For the decade of 2009-2019 it was more like 1.3%, or even less, based on "prosperity" growth, real-economic growth. That lagged behind population growth in most places, though Chinese prosperity did advance per capita. Prosperity per capita has been in a 20 year decline in places like the US and UK. My personal assessment is that peak industrial economy occurred around Summer 2018. This article shows a carbon-emission peak around early 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-022-00285-w 

  The banking repo-crisis in September 2019 reflected the inability of the biggest banks in the world to trust each other on overnight loans with US-Treasury debt as collateral, a systemic failure. The Fed stepped in to take on this function, pumping an estimated $2 trillion of promises of future wealth into the financial system before the end of 2019, as preparations for COVID-pandemic and financial direct-infusions to banking were both worked out in meetings in mid October 2019, on the same dates in New York, and the Wuhan (military olympic) Games were commencing.
  Through a thermoeconomics lens of real-economic contraction, which cannot be honestly reconciled with perpetual-growth economic theory, these events suggest narratives for crisis-management, while keeping the broken model of perpetual growth economy.  Fiat-money promises future wealth for financial investment today, but those promises cannot be kept in real terms. The divergence can be seen in these graphs:


  "Discretionary spending" is what is left over after essentials are purchased. This includes investments. As real prosperity contracts, especially per capita, discretionary spending falls fastest, since we all must buy food, fuel and housing first. We can see that all of the graphs that diverge from the blue of "prosperity" will have to collapse to meet that reality. GDP can be modified back to something more like GNP (better yet, with parasitic draws subtracted). Debt is something on the order of 10X real-economy, and real-economy is projected to keep contracting going forward, so this debt cannot even be "serviced" at some point in the near future. Interest rates are rising to defend the status of the $US currency, the basis of the western financial system, but that will cause massive defaults in debts. Pensions, to the degree that they are funded, are mostly funded through financial assets, stocks and bonds, which have been bid-up since 2009 in the "everything bubble", where "the Fed had your back". During the years of 2019 through to the present, there has been a further massive loss of ownership in the economy, except at the bllionaire level, where massive acquisition of productive assets has taken place. This has been the biggest wealth transfer ever, to the richest few elites, and coming before what must be the biggest financial crash ever, if financial reckoning is to approach reality, which it must.

  The rest of the world has long undergone resource-extraction by the $US, trading real economic outputs for "printed" dollars, which they then spend on other real economic output, as the value of those dollars slowly fades away. The $US is a faith-based currency, based upon faith that $US will still buy things in 5-10 years, with a certain, mild lossiness (2% inflation "target"). Faith in the $US is more important for the owner class than continuing the current Ponzi scheme, so $US value must be supported first. For $US instruments and debts to approach reality, the losses of asset-value will be most readily accomplished through a stock-market crash and bond crash. It looks like 90% is the right order of magnitude. Commercial debt will also default, and consumers will default on much of their debt. Countries that don't print their own currencies will default. Pensions will be unfunded, and this will be addressed in the context of falling real economy, which makes pensions seem unrealistic.

  The financialized west has the biggest problem here, since the postwar social contract has been based upon retirement security. The easiest thing for the financiers would be if most people would die before collecting their pensions. This has been brought up in the context of COVID-19, and of COVID-vaccine-products increasing mortality and appearing to progressively weaken immune systems against other infections and cancer-surveillance, destroying newly-mutated pre-cancerous cells before they grow into cancers. Famine is being staged throughout the world now, as is a war which is really between the 2 most nuclear-armed militaries in the world, with Ukraine as a proxy for the US/NATO. 

  The possibilities for elimination of any number of humans are all on the table, and the possibility for economically constraining or eliminating any single human is being worked on. In China, which is having a banking crisis, lockdowns kept people from going to their banks, and when lifted, health-passes turned RED when people traveled to their banks, so they had to return home, and could not get money or answers.

EU Renews Digital Covid Pass Despite 99% Negative Public Feedback

  In the EU, we see Germany and other countries opening up the mothballed coal-fired power plants (highest EROI, highest pollution). "This is a temporary measure because of the war". The war justifies whatever needs to be done, without the admission of having lied. 
The World Is Failing In Both Energy Affordability And Climate Goals

​  Can the same people who lied announce that they lied? Probably not. It would be a new thing. The development of a new global trade currency, based upon commodities (real economic production), and independent of "siegniorage" benefits to a country printing fiat-currency, would free all other countries of paying that particular economic rent. That currency would offer a parallel economic option, which would allow countries to default on $US debt, and also to tell foreign oil and mining companies that they no-longer had any claims on wells and mines, that those now belonged to the people of Venezuela, Iran and Peru, for instance.

  The threat to any country repudiating $US debt and foreign-ownership of national-resources and assets is the US/NATO military alliance, which does not "win" much lately, but inflicts severe pain and hardship upon countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and Venezuela, whch fail to subordinate their national interests to the western financial empire.

  The War in Ukraine continues to erode that threat. It is seen that western industry is no longer able to sustain the full production to supply a major war, as it did in Korea and Vietnam. Russian industry seems completely capable of this.

The Return of Industrial Warfare
.. In short, US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.
  The US is not the only country facing this challenge. In a recent war game involving US, UK and French forces, UK forces exhausted national stockpiles of critical ammunition after eight days.

  Venezuela has been granted a special dispensation to sell heavy crude to Germany, which has one refinery that can be configured to refine it. (Venezuela still does not get the national gold back from London, though.)  This can be decreed by the US because the US Navy does effectively rule the ocean shipping lanes. How long the control of shipping lanes by the "Atlanticist" powers may continue is in question. If the $US loses primacy suddenly, this will be unaffordable. In a longer monetary/trade contest, the US Navy would be a priority. 
This book review states the case for waning US naval dominance.    

  The faith-based global financial system must retain the faith of the wealthy elites, not only workers saving for retirement. The G-7 countries have just banned buying Russian gold, but Switzerland is not a mamber, and there is still no accounting for who took delivery of over 3 tons of Russian gold that entered Switzerland in May. (Financial elites feather their own nests. They might voice nationalist loyalties when it serves their interests.) It remains possible that this gold in Switzerland may correspond to Russian gold in other locations, such as Singapore, which could be there to backstop the "Golden Ruble" when it makes it's debut, and free of direct Rusian involvement. 
Most of the countries in the world are not G-7 members and would like to have Russian oil and gold.   https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/biden-g-7-will-ban-russian-gold-imports  
 
  It is reasonable to expect global financial elites to be prepared to have hedged their bets going into a global financial regime change, which is inevitable, but uncertain as to timing and ultimate format. How soon might they jump ship? If the regime is really about to change, the first to jump will get the most rewards, and the late-jumpers will lose out. The early jumpers could also lose "bigly"...

  For those of us who are financial peons, decisions are more real-world than financial/monetary. We all have finances and expenses, bills and debts. We can work to get out of debt as the best investment, then invest in things which will be of direct useto us in a lower energy future, like vegetable gardens, getting in shape by practicing bicycle transit, lowering our energy needs for comfort and fuel, and contributing to healthy families and friendship relations. 
  All of these have supported humans through history. The days of relying solely upon financial support to cover all needs are ending.

  A risk for us is to take the bait of free electronic money on the path to the end of the chute where we will have no choices and no ability to wiggle free. 
Another risk is to take in chemicals or medicines which will weaken or kill us in time, anything from Diet-Coke to Pfizer/Moderna products. 
We can invest in eliminating debts and addictive habits, and working on our own projects to build a decent human future.

Non-Financial Planner
(shown cutting up cornstalks in June which seems like August)


Thursday, June 23, 2022

Competing Paradigms

 Economic Participants,


​  ​Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that banks from BRICS nations can freely connect to the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), Russia’s alternative to SWIFT.
​  ​While addressing a BRICS business forum, Putin said that together with its BRICS partners – Brazil, India, China and South Africa – Russia is developing reliable alternatives for international payments.
​  ​“The Russian system for transmitting financial messages is open to connecting banks from the five countries,” he said, adding: “The geography of the use of the Russian payment system Mir is expanding.”

'Golden Ruble': Russian Think-Tank Proposes Stablecoin To Overcome Western Sanctions
..The measure is supposed to protect the golden ruble from US-led attempts to undermine its trading properties and value.
While it is not clear if the proposed coin will be convertible to the precious metal – a practice long abandoned by most fiat monies -, the VEB.RF noted that the golden ruble would be specifically designed for international trade and not intra-state use
Furthermore, it should be tradable by third countries without Russian involvement.

China Approves $2.3 Billion Loan for Crisis-Hit Pakistan Ahead of Potential IMF Deal

Sri Lanka Pins Hope on India, Russia as Fuel Supplies Run Out, Triggering Violence and Shutdowns
(Prime Minister)​ Wickremesinghe has lauded the role of New Delhi in the ongoing crisis, underlining that it is the only nation to have assisted Colombo. India has provided Sri Lanka with around $3 billion in economic assistance since the crisis broke out this year.
​  ​Wickremesinghe also began talks on Monday with a delegation from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is visiting Colombo for the first time since the south Asian nation requested a bailout package of nearly $3 billion.​   (How can Sri Lanka pay back the IMF? Impose "austerity"?)​

​Pepe Escobar: Exile on Main Street: The Sound of the Unipolar World Fading Away
.. An expanded BRICS with a parallel G8 configuration is bound to easily overtake the Western-centric one in importance as well as GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP).
​  ​BRICS in 2021 already added Bangladesh, Egypt, the UAE and Uruguay to its New Development Bank (NDB). In May, at Foreign Ministry-level debates, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Thailand were added to the 5 BRICS members. Leaders of some of these nations will be connected to the Beijing summit.
​  ​BRICS plays a completely different game from the G20. They aim for the grassroots, and it’s all about slowly “building trust” – a very Chinese concept. They are creating an independent Credit Rating Agency – away from the Anglo-American racket – and deepening a Currency Reserves Arrangement. The NDB – including its regional offices in India and South Africa – has been involved in hundreds of projects. Time will tell: one day the NDB will make the World Bank superfluous.


​Michael Every of Rabobank thinks BRICS initiatives are likely to be ineffectual (but he's not completely certain) [I think 3, then 2, then 1 happen in that order)
​  ​A BRICS alternative is that global shadow banking, actual banking, and real trade flows should all start to accept credit based on a new digital FX with commodities as collateral instead. Which also implies people won’t be able to repay their Eurodollar commitments.
​  ​There are lots of ways the West can respond to this.
1)​  ​Hedge fund billionaires and Wall Street can say ‘We want in!’, which is possible given Western financial systems operate like mercenaries rather than an army (which is why there are no countries around today that operate their national defence on that basis.) If that happens, some rich Westerners get richer, but the West loses its global pre-eminence and the geopolitical power to act on issues like Ukraine and Taiwan.
2)​  ​Or the Fed can say anyone using a BRICS currency loses access to the US financial system. That would bifurcate the world. As we already see with sanctions against Russia, it would also mean the West, and third parties, doesn’t get the commodities (or industrial goods) that the BRICS produce. That means massive inflation in some places, deflation in others, and global depression, not recession. I wouldn’t rule it out, but the end-game is clear.
3)​  ​Or the Fed can keep raising rates to force commodity prices down, raising the collateral attractiveness of the US$ and reducing that of its new rival. That would mean recession – and it already does. It would imply a massive blow-up for those leveraged long commodities - as with crypto. It would also make getting hold of US$ even harder - but that’s what Fed swap-lines, for friends, would be for. This is obviously not what the markets think will happen, and I understand why. (“Because markets.”) However, it’s not cartoonish. It’s just taking monetary policy into the geopolitical dimension, where it always sits, and most so when potential monetary rivals appear.

​Another perspective on WEF's "Great Reset": "It's not a Turndown". It's a Takedown", Catherine Austin Fitts​
​  ​High food and fuel prices along with crushing interest rates are no accident. CAF explains, "To me, this is part of the ‘going direct reset.’ ..."
​  ​“There is an official narrative, and the official narrative is they’ve got to stop inflation... Let’s look very simply at what happened. They voted on the direct reset. Then they injected $5 trillion into the economy that went to the insiders. Then they used Covid to shut down the economy run by the outsiders. Now, the outsiders want to open another business, and they are going to radically raise the cost of capital to the outsiders. What’s going to happen is that $5 trillion is going to buy more assets more cheaply. To me, this is part of centralizing the control of the economy. They are asserting very significant central control. This is not a turndown–this is a takedown.”
​  ​CAF’s view of the economy is simple and tangible. CAF says, “This is a world where people are trying to get into real assets that can generate a yield..."
​  ​"Let me tell you what the problem is. Doing things that create value on assets requires the rule of law. We are watching a very significant financial coup d’état. We have talked about this for years. That financial coup d’état is turning into a coup, and you are seeing a fundamental breakdown of law and order in many places. It is related to people trying to pick up assets. We see cities where crime is off the charts, and speculators are out having a field day picking up assets with that $5 trillion.”
​  ​CAF says, “At some point, you have to realize we are in a war..."
"We have an enemy. We have the power to win, but we are going to have to fight. If you look at our ancestors in the last 10,000 years, I dare say we have it in us. Let’s get out of fear and get into fighting mode. There are two roads. We can preserve, rebuild and protect the human civilization, or we can become slaves. If you look at what these guys are up to, death is not the worst thing that can happen to you. Do not fear death. Fear slavery in a transhuman society.”


​  No contracted pump turbine repair leads to severe reduction in Nordstream pipeline gas flows. 
German company Siemens shipped the turbines to Canadian maintenance site, which won't return them to Germany, for return to pumping duty. 
  Canada is sorry that Germany is hurt, but hands-are-tied. Germany is sorry that France, Austria and the Czech Republic are getting hurt, but hands-are-tied.
Canada working to return Russian gas turbines 
Ottawa intends to stick to anti-Russia sanctions, but does not want them to harm Germany  

​  ​Canada is exploring ways to return crucial parts for Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline, which are currently stuck in the country due to sanctions, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday citing Canadian Minister of Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson.​..
..​The parts fall under Canada’s penalties against Russia, and Ottawa says it cannot return them without breaching these restrictions.
​  ​“We want to respect the sanctions because the sanctions were put into place for a reason. That being said, the intent of the sanctions was never to cause significant pain to Germany, which is one of our closest friends and allies. So, we are very seized with this issue,” Wilkinson told the news outlet.
​  ​“We are talking to Germany, trying to find a pathway through which we can actually enable the flow of gas. There may be different options that we can look at,” he stated, adding that Ottawa is negotiating with Berlin on ways to return the equipment.
​  ​According to the German Federal Grid Agency, the reduction in gas flow affected the supply of Russian gas from Germany to other European countries, including France, Austria and the Czech Republic.

The President of Mexico has now again offered full asylum to Julian Assange.
“Mexico opens the doors to Assange,”
the president declared.
It is good to remember that AMLO spoke to Trump and offered asylum and he is now promising to speak to Biden, to again offer asylum.
AMLO’s briefing to journalists included playing the ‘collateral murder’ clip.

Covid Vaccines More Likely to Put You in Hospital Than Keep You Out, BMJ Editor’s Analysis of Pfizer and Moderna Trial Data Finds
​  ​Noting their study is limited by the fact that the raw data from COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials are not publicly available, they stress that “given the global public health implications, there is an urgency to make all COVID-19 trial data public, particularly regarding serious adverse events, without any further delay”.
​  ​They conclude that there is a need for formal harm-benefit analyses for Covid vaccines, taking into account the different levels of risk of serious Covid and adverse events that exist between demographic groups. Ideally, this would be based on individual participant data, they say, though such data remain frustratingly unavailable.

​  This is along and detailed read:  Pfizer Classified Almost All Severe Adverse Events During COVID Vaccine Trials ‘Not Related to Shots’
https://www.globalresearch.ca/pfizer-classified-almost-all-severe-adverse-events-during-covid-vaccine-trials-not-related-shots/5784254

Did Pfizer ​"​Roofie​"​ the Placebo Babies?​    (We need placebo vial contents independently analyzed. All destroyed? "Trade-secrets"?)​
Saline injections are not supposed to have such an aggressive side effects profile. So what exactly was in Pfizer's placebo injection?

​  The CDC did not monitor the Vaccine AdverseEvents Reporting System as per its own protocols.  Thanks Luc.
"It's the FDA's job" came an incorrect answer​.
..quite literally any other vaccine in history would have been pulled off the market for 1/100th of this.
this is either egregious dereliction of duty or an outright lie in FOIA response.
they either did not do the analysis because they knew what they’d find if they did
or
they did do the analysis and are hiding it because of what it showed and the fact that they could never justify inaction in the face of it.

there is simply no plausible case that they “forgot” or “did not think it was important” or “saw no reason to use resources on it.”


​  Thanks again, Luc. Danish National Board of Health admits vaccinating kids for COVID was a mistake
When (Director of N​a​tional Board of Health) Søren Brostrøm hosted 'Go' evening Live 'on TV 2 on Wednesday night, he was asked if it was a mistake to vaccinate children.
- ​"​With what we know today: yes. With what we knew then: no​"​, was the answer.

​  Exhausting and factual, Thanks MPSK: ​1000 ATHLETES - COLLAPSING | DYING | HEART PROBLEMS | BLOOD CLOTS - MARCH 2021 TO JUNE 2022

Thanks MPSK:  Fort Bragg lost over 80 soldiers from “sudden” and “unexplained” causes, and stopped reporting on the deaths after June 2021

 ..In just 18 months, Fort Bragg lost over 80 soldiers from “sudden” and “unexplained” causes. According to officials, 33 of the fatalities are of “undetermined” causes. Fort Bragg cannot explain why dozens of soldiers are dying in their own bunks.
  During that same eighteen-month period, three Fort Bragg soldiers died in overseas combat. This means soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg are twenty-seven times more likely to die unexpectedly on their home base than in overseas combat!
..Drugs are only a small part of the problem. In January of 2021, Army captain Robert Latham died suddenly of an “apparent heart attack.” The 32-year-old was previously in top physical condition. A Green Beret named Calvin Rockward passed away from a “sudden, unexpected medical event.” The 38-year-old was in excellent physical condition, too...   
https://gospelnewsnetwork.org/2022/03/16/fort-bragg-lost-over-80-soldiers-from-sudden-and-unexplained-causes-and-stopped-reporting-on-the-deaths-after-june-2021/ 

Why Take on the DoD? Humanity.
  Matthew Crawford keeps digging into the story of the US Military appearing to extensively falsify medical records and statistics related to COVID-19 and outcomes from mandatory (experimental) vaccinations.
  Over the past few months I have received a large number of communications—both from friends, interested parties, and people whom I don't trust alike—that go something like this, "You're opening a very dangerous can of worms."
  Yeah, well, we all die somehow. What a shame it would be for that to mean nothing.

 https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/why-take-on-the-dod-humanity

Trudeau Panics as Fully Vaccinated account for 9 in every 10 COVID-19 Deaths in Canada over the past month; 4 in every 5 of which were Triple Jabbed 

https://expose-news.com/2022/06/22/trudeau-panics-9-in-10-covid-deaths-fully-vaccinated/

Do long term statistics support routine early childhood vaccination, as currently practiced? Are there other population consequences?  Some interesting statistics ("No free lunch"?)    https://rumble.com/v106rmt-stunning-dr.-paul-thomas-blows-up-the-conventional-vaccine-narrativeincredi.html


Routinely Misinformed 
​(Pictured reinforcing one of the last of 13 kitchen cabinets prior to installation)​


Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Act Rationally

Autonomous Humans,

  I have not had to face a complete threat to my worldview. That has made a lot of what is going on much easier for me to accept. I grew up with intelligent and broadly traveled grandparents on both sides who did not trust the wealthy, powerful or governments for very clear and established reasons. 

  I learned to drive and drove thousands of miles the summer of 1973, then we moved to Japan, and the Yom Kippur War and Arab Oil Embargo happened. 
I was taught about the Limits to Growth as that embargo was going on across the Pacific in the USA. Resources get used up. Pollution happens. Economy shrinks. Population can't be supported anymore so a lot of people die, but it would all happen in about 50 years; nothing bad until economic collapse time. 
"I may not even be alive in 50 years, but I sure won't get a retirement", I thought. 
Here we are.


Charles Hugh Smith, Our Economy In a Nutshell
The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling.

​  ​Beneath its surface stability, our economy is precarious because the foundation of the global economy-- cheap energy--has reached an inflection point: from now on, energy will become more expensive.
​  ​The cost will be too low for energy producers to make enough money to invest in future energy production, and too high for consumers to have enough money left after paying for the essentials of energy, food, shelter, etc., to spend freely.
​  ​For the hundred years that resources were cheap and abundant, we could waste everything and call it growth: when an appliance went to the landfill because it was designed to fail (planned obsolescence) so a new one would have to be purchased, that waste was called growth because the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) went up when the replacement was purchased.
​  ​A million vehicles idling in a traffic jam was also called growth because more gasoline was consumed, even though the gasoline was wasted.
​  ​This is why the global economy is a "waste is growth" Landfill Economy​.​..

​  Now that we've consumed all the easy-to-get resources, all that's left is hard to get and expensive. For example, minerals buried in mountains hundreds of miles from paved roads and harbors require enormous investments in infrastructure just to reach the deposits, extract, process and ship them to distant mills and refineries. Oil deposits that are deep beneath the ocean floor are not cheap to get.
​  ​Does it really make sense to expect that the human population can triple and our consumption of energy increase ten-fold and there will always be enough resources to keep supplies abundant and prices low? No, it doesn't.
​  ​Many people believe that nuclear power (fusion, thorium reactors, mini-reactors, etc.) will provide cheap, safe electricity that will replace hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas). But nuclear power is inherently costly, and there are presently no full-scale fusion or thorium reactors providing cheap electricity to thousands of households.
​  ​Reactors take many years to construct and are costly to build and maintain. Cost over-runs are common. A new reactor in Finland, for example, is nine years behind schedule and costs have tripled.
The U.S. has built only two new reactors in the past 25 years.​..

​  ​Many believe so-called renewable energy such as solar and wind will replace hydrocarbons. But as analysts Nate Hagens has explained, these sources are not truly renewable, they are replaceable; all solar panels and wind turbines must be replaced at great expense every 20 to 25 years. These sources are less than 5% of all energy we consume, and it will take many decades of expansion to replace even half of the hydrocarbon fuels we currently consume.
​  ​To double the energy generated by wind/solar in 25 years, we'll need to build three for each one in service today: one to replace the existing one and two more to double the energy being produced.
​  ​All these replacements for hydrocarbons require vast amounts of resources: diesel fuel for transport, materials for fabricating turbines, panels, concrete foundations, and so on.
​  ​Humans are wired to want to believe that whatever we have now will still be ours in the future. We don't like being told we'll have less of anything in the future.
​  ​The current solution is to create more money out of thin air in the belief that if we create more money, then more oil, copper, iron, etc. will be found and extracted.​..​​..Many people feel good about recycling a small part of what we consume. But recycling is not cost-free, and the majority of what we consume is not recycled.
​  ​The percentage of lithium batteries that are recycled, for example, is very low, less than 5%. We have to mine vast quantities of lithium because we dump 95% of lithium-ion batteries in the landfill. There are many reasons for this, one being that the batteries aren't designed to be recycled because this would cost more money.
​  ​The majority of all manufactured goods--goods that required immense amounts of hydrocarbons to make--are tossed in the landfill.
​  ​Goods and services are commoditized and sourced from all over the world in long dependency chains (hyper-globalization): if one link breaks, the entire supply chain breaks.​..

..​Each of these systems is dependent on all the other systems (what we call a tightly bound system), so when one critical system unravels, the crisis quickly spreads to the entire economic system: one domino falling knocks down all the dominoes snaking through the global economy.​  (Internet?)
​   Those who understand how tightly interconnected, unsustainable systems are basically designed to unravel can prepare themselves by becoming antifragile: flexible, adaptable and open to the opportunities that arise when things are disorderly and unpredictable.​  (Easily said.)

M.K. Bhadrakumar, “West at inflection point in Ukraine war”​  ​“Fundamentally, the Western economies are facing a systemic crisis. The complacency that the reserve-currency-based US economy is impervious to ballooning debt; that the petrodollar system compels the entire world to purchase dollars to finance their needs; that the flood of cheap Chinese consumer goods and cheap energy from Russia and Gulf States would keep inflation at bay; that interest rate hikes will cure structural inflation; and, above all, that the consequences of taking a trade-war hammer to a complex network system in the world economy can be managed — these notions stand exposed.”​   ​https://www.indianpunchline.com/west-at-inflection-point-in-ukraine-war/


​  Michael Hudson article is short enough that I won't edit it, but it hinges upon a point that Charles made above, that the prices are too low for producers and too high for consumers. In classic and Marxist analysis the cost of energy is not considered as such, because coal was just one input, for instance. Hudson does not often give enough thought to why energy costs are too high for consumers and too low for energy producers​. He does look at parasitic costs of predatory financial capitalism, how nobody makes money investing long term anymore (refineries in the news. Also predatory costs of bureaucracy, especially as to making mandates that happen to create a single monopoly in many fields, with monopoly pricing, and the costs of ever growing regulatory and distributive bureaucracies. 
The crude "fix" to rebalance the system is to squeeze the wages of productive workers. This has been done already since 1977. At the same time the costs of daily life, fees, taxes, professional bills, utilities, licensing, groceries, medical and other insurance have all gone up, up, up. That card is being played again, by raising interest rates, but the squeezed have no blood to give. More are losing their places to live. Another recent interview had Professor Hudson advocating "making America Great again" by copying China copying the America of 120 years ago. That would mean putting all public utilities back in public ownership, including banking (Bank of North Dakota style) and lowering predatory rent costs to the economic system that way.
The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages

​   ​Addendum: Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism reminds me that: “Paul Volcker made it explicit that the Fed is in the business of crushing labor. As reported by William Greider in Secrets of the Temple, when Volcker was driving interest rates to the moon, he kept a note card in his pocket. It was a record of weekly average construction wages. Volcker wanted them to go down as proof his harsh medicine was working.”    https://thesaker.is/the-feds-austerity-program-to-reduce-wages/


​ ​This explanation is only semi-rational, even if you don't know that cheap energ​y ​resources and global economy are in terminal burnout. In my assessment TPTB just need a big enough war to always be a big enough emergency for whatever emergency measures they need to declare until they figure out "the new thing".​

New British Army Chief Sir Patrick’s Contentious Statement: “Prepare The Army to Fight in Europe Once Again”
​ ..On the one hand, a perpetual proxy war could atrophy Russian resources and uphold the US’ recently restored unipolar hegemony over Europe on an anti-Russian basis, but it could also backfire by collapsing its proxies’ economies, widening already emerging divisions between them over the conflict (e.g. the “Big Three” vs. UK-CEE), and boggling the US-led West down in Europe instead of focusing more on “containing” China in Asia. A possible “compromise” between these grand strategic visions is for the US to support the gradual de-escalation of the Ukrainian Conflict in light of the increasingly obvious impossibility of Kiev’s victory but ensure that the UK keeps stoking EU-Russian tensions indefinitely.
​  ​In practice, this could take the form of supporting the convergence between the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative” (3SI, with its core being the “Lublin Triangle” that comprises the newly de factoPolish–Ukrainian Confederation and Lithuania) and the UK’s regional alliance plans as a structural wedge between Russia and the “Big Three” (France, Germany, and Italy). That could in turn maintain some unbridgeable differences between them (i.e. geopolitical, geo-economic, and military) so as to perpetually prevent any meaningful rapprochement in the future that would risk eroding the US’ recently restored hegemony over the bloc.
​  ​With this in mind, the British army chief’s policy statement that his island-state should prepare for fighting a war in Europe makes more sense since it’s aimed at preconditioning the armed forces and the population that funds them into expecting a sustained military deployment to CEE.

​  This is actually not a bad assessment and looks at a lot of current crises-in-motion. (There is plenty of dirty coal, not the clean coal that industry used up in WW-1)
Rabobank: We Are Heading For More Crashes, Bangs, Wallops
​  ​Indeed, as noted yesterday, Europe --like China-- is plunging back into coal production again as Russian gas-flows tail off rapidly. The EU is chastising individual European countries for this backsliding, which makes sense in terms of a green strategy using future technology and future inputs, but little in terms of being able to keep the lights on this winter with current ones.
​  ​The US is also flailing for a response to high gasoline and diesel prices, and we have now seen two floated solutions: 1) subsidy cards for consumers - stymied by the US not having the chips to even make them, which speaks volumes about supply-side problems; and 2) that the US --like China-- should start a state oil refinery to reverse the 5% drop in capacity since Covid, but would still take years to happen, even if were politically ‘acceptable’, which it isn’t.
​  ​The food situation, linked to energy, looks even worse.


  ​Paul sends this book review, the premise of which is that global shipping, especially the very large, very low massive container and tanker ships, have relied on the US Navy to keep the seas free from pirates, and the US no longer even has a merchant marine service.​ One successful business is modeling its shipping investments on the progressive failure of the US Navy to protect global shipping, and it is doing quite well. To me, the US could protect anybody's ships as long as the finance was going through western banks in dollars, the oil trade in $US cemented this, but all this will change. We will see much more uncertainty than even now, in the ability to supply goods across oceans. Supply lines will break and industrial production will halt. Charles mentioned that above, and this is one mechanism.
The End Of The World Is Just Beginning For Shipping


UK Government Approves Extraditing Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange To Same Country that “Plotted to Assassinate” Him



  ​It's just an emergency, just for right now, not forever, back to green when Russia loses...​

Netherlands Follows Germany, Lifts Restrictions On Coal-Fired Power Stations Amid Drop In Russian Gas Supplies



​  "Fghting ISIS" , Stealing stuff for democracy.
US Occupation Troops Steal Wheat from Syria to Send to Iraq
In addition to stealing Syrian wheat supplies, the US military has also been stealing Syrian oil

​  ​US occupation forces in Syria led a convoy of 40 trucks, each filled up with stolen Syrian wheat, into Iraq from Syria, according to an 18 June report from Syrian state news agency SANA.
​  ​The report indicates that the US military, along with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), looted large quantities of wheat from the Al-Jazeera region and transported it towards the Al-Waleed border crossing, where it entered Iraq on 18 June.
​  ​The report noted that this was not the only convoy filled with stolen goods led by the US military. Another convoy with 36 vehicles, filled with stolen Syrian wheat, crossed Al-Waleed border from the Tal Hamis area...

​  ​Damascus considers US presence in northeastern Syria a means of stealing Syrian resources...
​..​The US military routinely smuggles Syrian oil into northern Iraq, in a move that is both in violation of international law and as routine practice that shows how deeply entrenched the US is in its occupation of both nations.
​  ​The theft of Syrian food and fuel supplies is taking place amid a global food and fuel crisis.
​  ​Countries like Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen are already dealing with severe economic and food crises.
​  ​Once a major wheat producer, Syria is now facing food shortages. The western-backed war on Syria as well as a recent drought has made Syria more dependent on Russian wheat.   
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-occupation-troops-steal-wheat-from-syria-send-to-iraq/5784105


​  Moon of Alabama fails to employ Rational-Actor-Theory. Since I do not see the Federal Government as "moral"​, this looks like standard trade protectionist practice. I am told that 3-layer solar panels are about to revolutionize that industry with much higher efficiencies at similar production costs. it's proven technology, but was only used in space, due to licensing restrictions. Patents just expired. This will mess with global supply chains in a major way in the near term, which will conserve natural resources by impairing global economy with roadblocks.
This New Import Law Will Hurt U.S. Consumers
Today the the U.S., suffering from high inflation caused by a lack of supplies, is launching the dumbest sanction regime ever:
  A new law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, goes into effect in the United States on Tuesday and will bar products that were made in Xinjiang or have ties to the work programs there from entering the country. It requires importers with any ties to Xinjiang to produce documentation showing that their products, and every raw material they are made with, are free of forced labor — a tricky undertaking given the complexity and opacity of Chinese supply chains.
  In theory, the new U.S. law should block all goods made with any raw materials that are associated with Xinjiang until they are proven to be free of slavery or coercive labor practices...
  For small importers it will be impossible to do the above. Only big companies can afford to research and provide all that data and to take the risk of importing products that may get confiscated at the border. They will of course ask their customers to pay for all that.
  For the U.S. consumer this does not only mean higher prices but likely less access to products they need or want. The U.S. industry is not in state where it can provide on the scale that China can.
  To avoid the scrutiny Chinese producers may eventually move their factories. But they will move to countries in South Asia and not to the United States.
  Why the 'green agenda' Biden administration thought that this is a smart move is beyond me. 
(It does reduce resource consumption through economic strangulation. "Green" is a control narrative, which was somewhat compatible with physical reality , but less and less lately.)

Chris Hedges: The Triumph of Death

​  ​The global ruling class is cementing into place a world where they govern without accountability, we are reduced to serfdom, the climate crisis accelerates and mass death is normalized.​..

​  The campaign against Assange, and I have sat in on hearings in London, is a Dickensian farce, the persecution of an innocent and heroic man, far more reminiscent of the Lubyanka than the best of British jurisprudence. He is being used to send a message — if you expose what we do we will destroy you.

​No statistical evidence of benefit:​ "Hey, we tested these vaccines on several kids and they all did ok. This stuff is fine!" 
(Drug companies are exempt from lawsuits on approved childhood vaccines.)
FDA “Approves” COVID Vaccine for 6-month-old Babies Despite Study Finding Persistent Heart Abnormalities Among COVID Vaccinated Children

Conscientious Objector
(pictured with cooking banana experimental project)



Monday, June 20, 2022

Non WEF Alliances

Subjects of Empire,

  Pepe Escobar, who has attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, has an essay summarizing it. 
You have seen analysis of President Putin's keynote address, upon which he does not further expand. 
The main focus here is that economic corridors in the world, analogous to sea-routes or the old silk road, are a new battlefield for control and rent-collection of international trade. 
Pipelines are the purest example, but he looks at the Russia, Iran, India corridor in detail here. Donetsk will be shipping steel to Iran along this corridor soon.    
St. Petersburg sets the stage for the War of Economic Corridors
In St. Petersburg, the world’s new powers gather to upend the US-concocted “rules-based order” and reconnect the globe their way

Michael Hudson's recent interview is largely on the history of western economics as a study, updated to current trends.
Economic Rent and Exploitation:
..Patten cited public roads and canals to lower the cost of doing business. He also noted that every time you build a road or railroad, you’re going to raise the land value along these routes – and lower land prices for areas replaced by the now-more-accessible producers. You can simply self-finance the cost of these by taxing the rent.
  You also need public education, and that should be free so that you don’t have like today, to earn enough money to pay an enormous student debt – and receive a high salary to afford to pay that...

..So the movement towards public infrastructure towards government spending was led by the industrialists. It was they themselves who wanted strong government. The common denominator of politics from Adam Smith through all of the 19th century was to free economies from the unnecessary economic rent, to free them from unearned income, from the free lunch. To do that, you have to have a government strong enough to take on the vested interests – first the landlord class in the House of Lords, and then the financial class behind it...

..Government infrastructure is a fourth means of production. But what makes it different from profits and wages is that if you’re a wage earner, you want to make as high a wage as possible. If you’re a capitalist, you want to make as high a profit as possible. But the job of public investment is not to make an income, not to do what was done under Thatcher and Tony Blair, not to treat public utilities, education and health as profit making opportunities. Instead, Patten said, you should measure their productivity by how much they lower the cost of doing business and the cost of living for the economy at large...

..Protectionists in America said the way to minimise costs – and it may seem an oxymoron to you – the way you minimise costs is to have high-wage labour. You raise the wages of labour, or more specifically, you want to raise the living standards, because highly paid labour, highly educated labour, well fed labour, well rested labour is more productive than pauper labour. So they said explicitly, America’s going to be a high wage economy. We’re not like Europe. Our higher wages are going to provide high enough living standards to provide high labour productivity. And our higher labour productivity, shorter working day, better working conditions, healthy working conditions, public health, well educated labor will undersell that of countries that don’t have an active public sector...

..Needless to say, the fight for the kind of democracy that will free economies from economic rent was not easy. By the late 1880s, and especially the 1890s, you had the rentiers fighting back. In America the fight was led by John Bates Clark. There was a movement, which today is called neoliberalism, to deny the entire thrust of classical economics. Clarke said that there is no such thing is unearned income. That meant that economic rent does not exist. Whatever a businessman makes, he is said to earn. Whatever a landlord makes, he earns – so there was no unearned income...

On difficulties with big government and small government:  
..In the 19th century, in order to tax the land rent, you had to take on the most powerful vested interests of all: the real estate interests and the financial interests. But Henry George was a libertarian. He was for small government. He broke with the socialists, because he warned that socialism had a potential for authoritarianism. Well, we know that he was right in that warning, because we saw what happened in Stalinist Russia. But obviously, what you want is a government that is strong and democratic, and with enough authority to tax and regulate the vested interests. (That term is Veblen’s, by the way.) That was the ideal in America, but it needed a strong enough government so that Teddy Roosevelt could come in and be able to bust the trusts.​..​

​..​The government was strong enough in 1913-14 to impose an American income tax that fell just on 1% of the population, almost entirely on economic rent, on land rent, mineral rent on monopoly rent of the big corporations. If you’re a libertarian, your government is too small to take on these vested interests. And you’ll never win...

..I find little interest in today’s socialist movement or the socialist movement 50 years ago about land rent. They are more concerned about international issues, about war, about almost everything except land rent. And today I find the greatest interest in rent theory as a guide to a tax system in the context of an overall economic system to be in China. So that’s really where the debate over how to keep the price of housing down by keeping the financial sector from trying to capitalise the land rent into a bank loan...

..Russia could have been a low-cost economy. It could have kept the oil and gas, Yukos, GazProm, nickel and platinum resources all in the public domain to finance investment in re-industrialization, to become independent of the West. But as we all know, Ted and the people that Fred Harrison bought were completely overwhelmed by the billions of dollars that U.S. diplomats spent on promoting kleptocracy and shock therapy in Russia. Its officials andinsiders worked for themselves, not Russia...

..The National Income and Product Accounts treat rent as a product, not a subtrahend
A byproduct of this value-free doctrine is how countries calculate their national income and product accounts. And if you look at the GDP accounts for the United States (and I’ve published a number of articles on my website and in major economic journals), rent is counted as part of GDP.​..
..A classical economic accounting format would show how much of the prices for what our society produces is actually necessary, and how much is a subtrahend. Classical economists treat the land rent that you pay, interest charges and monopoly prices as a rake-off. So not all of your income is income equals “product,” because only a portion of that income represents a real product.
​  ​In America, the head of Goldman Sachs a few years ago said Goldman Sachs partners – a financial management firm – make more money than almost anyone else in America, because they’re the most productive. If you make a lot of money, by definition, you make it by being productive. That’s the false identity
...

..A precondition for what you call an economist, especially a Nobel Prize winning economist, is not to understand how the economy works. Because if you understand that, you’re going to threaten the vested interests that are getting the free lunch. You have to say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, everybody earns whatever they can get. Robbers and criminals like that idea. “Yeah, we stole it fair and square!”..

...So the way that the economy works today is no longer industrial capitalism; it is finance capitalism. Instead of Industrial Engineering, making society produce more with all of the environmental protection cost included, you have financial engineering, making wealth by increasing stock-market prices. Wealth is not achieved by earning it. You don’t save up your earnings and get wealthy. I think half of Americans are unable to raise $400 In an emergency. They have no savings at all..

.​..​Under Reagan’s 1981 tax “reform” you could pretend that if you buy a big commercial building, you can write off 1/7 of the entire costs every single year as tax deductible income. At the end of seven years, you change your ownership from one name to another name, and you start all over again. The same building can be re depreciated again and again and again... But nowhere in the national income statistics is a report of how much income real estate owners actually claim as depreciation. They haven’t done that because if they showed this, people would think, ‘Wait a minute, this is a giveaway. This is utterly unrealistic.”​...​

..The purpose of industrial capitalism was to free economies from the legacy of feudalism. And the legacy of feudalism was the landlord-warrior class collecting hereditary rent and the predatory banks that were not making loans for industry. None of the industrialists got their money to invest from banks. The inventors of the steam engine couldn’t get loans except by mortgaging their houses. Banks don’t lend money to create capital, only for the right to foreclose on it...

..Until 1971, countries running a balance of payments deficit would have to settle it either in gold or by selling off their industry to investors in the payments-surplus countries. Well, beginning with the war in Korea in 1950-1951, the U.S. balance of payments moved into deficit. The entire U.S. balance of payments deficit from the Korean War to the 1970s was a result of its foreign military spending.

​  By ​the time the Vietnam war was ending, the Americans had to sell its gold every month. Vietnam had been a French colony, so the banks there were French. As America spent more dollars in Southeast Asia, these dollars were sent from local French bank branches to their head offices in Paris. The Paris bank would turn over these dollars to the central bank for francs, and the central bank, under General de Gaulle, would cash in these dollars for gold.
​  ​Germany was doing the same thing, using its export proceeds that were paid in dollars to buy gold...

..My job at Chase was to analyse basically the balance of payments of Third World countries and then of the oil industry. I had to develop an accounting format to find how much does the oil industry actually makes in the rest of the world. I had to calculate natural-resource rent, and how large it was. I did that from 1964 till October 1967. Then I had to quit to finish my dissertation to get the PhD. And then I developed the system of balance-of-payments analysis that actually was the way it had been calculated before GDP analysis.
​ I went to work for Arthur Andersen and spent a year calculating the whole U.S. balance of payments. That’s where I found that it was all military in character, and I began to write in popular magazines like Ramparts, warning that America’s foreign wars were forcing it to run out of gold. That was the price that America was paying for its military spending abroad.
​  I realised as soon as it went off gold in 1971 that America now had a cost-free means of military spending. Suppose you were to go to the grocery store and just pay in IOUs. You could just keep spending If you could convince the owner, the grocer to use the IOU to pay the farmers and the dairy people for their products. What if everybody else used these IOUs as money? You would continue to get your groceries for free.
​  ​That’s how the United States economy works under the dollar standard, at least until the present...

..Just about everybody thought that it would take many years for China, Russia, Iran, India, Indonesia and other countries to get their act together and create an alternative. But this year the Biden administration itself destroyed America’s free ride for the dollar. First the United States grabbed Venezuela’s foreign exchange, then Biden grabbed all of the foreign exchange of Afghanistan, just confiscated it. And then a month ago he confiscated $300 billion of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves. He said, in effect, that we are the leading democracy in the world, and global democracy means that America’s military gets to appoint foreign presidents...

..Europe has committed economic suicide, United States offered its leaders a lot of money in their offshore accounts, and made sure that their kids got free education in the United States. But in return, they would have to represent the United States, not Germany, France or other countries. The Americans have been meddling in European politics for years. European politicians do not represent their own countries. They represent the American State Department and American diplomacy. And they were told to lock their countries into the U.S. economy...
..America said that you Europeans are bothering them by trying to stop global warming. That’s a direct attack on a major arm of U.S. diplomacy, the oil industry. American companies control almost all the world’s oil trade. It’s the highest rent-yielding sector in the world. And it’s income-tax free. It’s politically powerful, and as long as America can control the oil trade, it can talk to Latin American countries or African countries and say if they elect a leader that U.S. officials don’t like, it can impose sanctions and stop exporting oil to them to freeze them out. They won’t get fertilizer, so the U.S. can starve you out. It can put a sanction on their food trade.

Agriculture is Americans biggest trade surplus...

Regarding the developing alternate world trade block:  

They’re going to hold each other’s currencies. Especially now that Russia is denominating its exports, in roubles instead of dollars. The American banks have lost the trade financing of the world oil trade, certainly Russian oil and agricultural trade. Instead of holding dollars, countries will hold rouble reserves to stabilise their currencies via the rouble, China is holding rouble reserves, and Russia is holding Chinese yuan reserves.
  The balance will be held more in gold and some kind of assets without a liability attached to them. I think the logical direction in which this is moving is that the non-dollar countries will create their own version of the International Monetary Fund, their own World Bank, their own trade organization...

..If American Europe is left with its current foreign policy, biowarfare and atomic bombs, NATO will be shunned by the civilised world. As Rosa Luxemburg said a century ago, the choice is between socialism or barbarism. NATO, Europe and America represent the new barbarism. The alternative is socialism. That is how the world seemed to be developing in Europe and America until World War I untracked everything. The rest of the world now has a chance to get back on track. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the West.     https://thesaker.is/economic-rent-and-exploitation-michael-hudson-shepheard-walwyn/

  Russian warships have destroyed a Ukrainian command center with Kalibr cruise missiles, killing dozens officers, Moscow's Defense Ministry reported on Sunday.   “More than 50 generals and officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were killed,” the statement outline. The strike took place near the village of Shirokaya Dacha in Dnepropetrovsk Region. It hit a compound where commanders of several Ukrainian units had gathered for a meeting, according to Moscow.  The ministry added that Kalibr missiles were also used to destroy 10 M777 howitzers and up to 20 armored vehicles that were recently delivered from the West, and had been stored inside a factory building in the southern city of Nikolayev.    https://www.rt.com/russia/557428-50-ukrainian-generals-officers-killed-russia/

  The 3M14T has a range of 1500-2500 kilometers. The missile’s guidance system is built around an INS [inertial navigation system] and GLONASS satellite guidance systems. The cruise missile, which has a top speed of Mach 2.9, can fly as low as 20 meters above water and 50 meters above ground with a help of a TERCOM [terrain contour matching] system. It is armed with a 450 kg HE-FRAG [high explosive fragmentation] or bunker buster warhead.  The Russian military stepped up its missiles strikes on Ukraine in the last few days. As a result, Kiev forces sustained heavy losses in personnel and equipment.  Russia has been using precision-guided, long-range missiles like the Kalibr against high-value targets of Kiev forces since the beginning of its special military operation in Ukraine. These missiles have proven to be highly-effective and almost impossible to intercept.  https://southfront.org/russia-says-50-senior-officers-of-kiev-forces-were-killed-in-kalibr-missile-strike-video/

Lithuania Bans Transit Of Sanctioned Russian Goods To Kaliningrad   (Poking the bear again. Russia does not want to "attack" 2 NATO members.)
​  ​The EU sanctions list includes coal, metals, construction materials, and advanced technology.
​  ​Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian oblast, said the ban would cover around 50 percent of the items that Kaliningrad imports.
Alikhanov said the region, which has an ice-free port on the Baltic Sea, will call on Russian federal authorities to take tit-for-tat measures against the EU country for imposing the ban. He said he would also seek to have more goods sent by ship to the oblast...
..The commission stated that sanctioned goods and cargo should still be prohibited even if they travel from one part of Russia to another but through EU territory.
​  ​Russia's Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad, sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, became part of the Soviet Union after World War II. It has a population of about 430,000 people and hosts the headquarters of Russia's Baltic sea fleet.

​(Gonzalo Lira has a video out, projecting that the US will use Kaliningrad as a provocation for direct NATO war with Russia, and that he expects it to go nuclear.)​
​  ​In Moscow's eyes, this is tantamount to laying economic siege to part of Russia's sovereign territory and one million of its citizens. When the EU first proposed the blockage of goods as part of the last major sanctions package in early April, Kremlin officials warned of war given Moscow would have to "break the blockade" for the sake of its citizens...
"If they want to go to the length of making us break this blockade to save the lives of our people, who live there, we can do this," Dzhabarov said in a video interview at the press center of Parlamentskaya Gazeta (Parliamentary Newspaper).
He expressed hope, however, that the West "will have enough brains to opt against this".​..
..Additionally he ( Alikhanov) cited a key condition that was part of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to the EU. He quoted the prior agreement saying that the Baltic state "will apply in practice the principle of freedom of transit of goods, including energy, between the Kaliningrad Region and the rest of Russian territory."
​  "In particular, we confirm that there shall be freedom of such transit, and that the goods in such transit shall not be subject to unnecessary delays or restrictions and shall be exempt from customs duties and transit duties or other charges related to transit," Alikhanov quoted the Joint Statement further as saying.

Moscow will throw its full support toward helping the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics revive their war-torn economies, Russia’s trade and industry minister, Denis Manturov, told RT on Friday.
“We have met with the heads of both republics for detailed talks over plans for economic reconstruction,” ...
​ 
 ​The Construction Ministry said it would also help rebuild and manage critical infrastructure and prepare for the winter
Schools, hospitals and daycare centers, as well as housing, will be the priorities.
​  ​The Donbass republics have already signed cooperation agreements with several Russian regions. Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has recently announced that 300 specialists from the city are already working to restore the water supply in Donetsk.
​  ​Meanwhile, DPR leader Denis Pushilin said on Friday that a deal had been signed to buy food and building materials from Iran. He added that Donetsk plans to sell metal, cast iron, mining equipment, fertilizer, and other goods to the Islamic Republic.

KURDISH, PRO-GOVERNMENT & IRANIAN-BACKED FORCES SET UP JOINT OPERATION ROOM IN SYRIA’S ALEPPO​  (This is an allied joint command.)
​  Kurdish, pro-government and Iranian-backed formations had established a joint operations room called the “North Thunderbolt” in Syria’s Aleppo to coordinate against Turkey, the Al-Monitor reported on June 19.
​  ​The operatio​​ns room, which was established on May 25, is headquartered at a Russian base in the village of Hardatnin in the northern countryside of Aleppo.​..
..Two Russian officers, three officers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, three Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leaders and two leaders from the pro-government forces are reportedly present at the operations room, which commands some 600 fighters.

​  Medical Vitamin-D expert, David Grimes MD has been sorting through Canadian government health statistics, which are cumulative. 
He substacted the totals from the week of 4/10/22 from the week of 4/17/22 and found this information about COVID deaths for that week.​
​  ​Covid-19 deaths among the unvaccinated increased from 9511 to 9512, an increase during the week of just one. 
Only 1 of the 227 Covid-19 deaths was a person who had not been vaccinated. Let this true but unpublicised fact sink in.

​Somewhat Less Threatened
​(pictured with heterogeneous Mexican avocado seedling cold-survival research subjects)