Bretton Woods III

[...] This crisis is not like anything we have seen since President Nixon took the U.S. dollar off gold in 1971 – the end of the era of commodity-based money. When this crisis (and war) is over, the U.S. dollar should be much weaker and, on the flipside, the renminbi much stronger, backed by a basket of commodities. From the Bretton Woods era backed by gold bullion, to Bretton Woods II
backed by inside money (Treasuries with un-hedgeable confiscation risks), to Bretton Woods III backed by outside money (gold bullion and other commodities). After this war is over, “money” will never be the same again. (read more)

Will Russian Gold Sanctions Finally Reveal that The Emperor Has No Clothes?
Part I of II

The Immorality of Economic Sanctions and the False Narratives of How Much Russia Will Be Hurt By Them

To begin, there is much propaganda and hysteria about how much economic sanctions applied by Western nations will hurt Russia. Firstly, economic sanctions are an immoral tool of warfare because it always devastates the people that have nothing to do with the war far more than the oligarchs that rule the government upon which sanctions are imposed, as economic sanctions, as a tool of warfare, have never been designed to inflict maximum damage against political oligarchs.  (read more)

Russian Gold Sanctions: The Conclusion

[...] The Possible Blowback?

In order to force the world to accept that the emperor has no clothes in derivative gold and silver markets, Russian agents (since Russian bankers themselves are banned from participation in London and New York precious metal derivative markets) can show the world that the Emperor Has No Clothes in the international gold markets by forcing the percentages of gold and silver derivative contracts that settle in not just physical, but settle with load-out requests, much higher from current levels.

At a time when gold bar bans on Russia will place even more stress on likely inadequately supplied inventories that back Western gold derivative market trading, the custodians running these potential Ponzi schemes desire the exact opposite of the above - higher percentages of derivative contract settlements in EFP and cash transactions. Paper being swapped and exchanged for more paper in physical derivative commodity markets is necessary to keep the fraud alive and if shrinking physical inventories keep shrinking, there eventually will be a line that is crossed that will either necessitate laws being changed by the LBMA and CME that make it illegal to load-out gold (and silver) in order to protect their paper shell game. And if this happens, well you can own your gold and silver in LBMA and CME markets, but simply never legally take possession of it.

In any event, since increasing economic sanctions against Russia are likely to spark retaliatory actions, the BOE, the Feds and the Bank of France may want to tread very carefully in forcing further gold sanctions against Russia as to not force a surprise attack on likely illegitimate Western gold and silver derivative markets that would, once and for all, prove that the Emperor Has No Clothes. (read more)

A Petroyuan Would Be a Kick in the Gut for the Dollar

Last week, I asked the question: is the US undermining the dollar’s credibility?

It appears the answer is — yes.

In another blow for dollar dominance, Saudi Arabia is reportedly considering pricing at least some of its Chinese oil sales in yuan.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the move would “dent the US dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia.”

The “petrodollar” serves as a crucial support for the US dollar.

The majority of global oil sales are priced in dollars. This ensures a constant demand for the greenback. Every country needs dollars to buy oil. This helps support the US government’s borrow and spend policy with its massive deficits. As long as the world needs dollars for oil, the Federal Reserve can keep printing dollars to monetize the debt.

ZeroHedge explained how the process works.

One of the core staples of the past 40 years, and an anchor propping up the dollar’s reserve status, was a global financial system based on the petrodollar – this was a world in which oil producers would sell their product to the US (and the rest of the world) for dollars, which they would then recycle the proceeds in dollar-denominated assets and while investing in dollar-denominated markets, explicitly prop up the USD as the world reserve currency, and in the process backstop the standing of the US as the world’s undisputed financial superpower.”

Saudi Arabia has sold oil exclusively for dollars since 1974 under a deal with the Nixon administration. If the Saudis shift away from the dollar and sell oil for yuan, it would be bad news for dollar dominance. And good news for the Chinese currency.

According to the WSJ, China buys more than 25% of Saudi oil exports.

If priced in yuan, those sales would boost the standing of China’s currency. The Saudis are also considering including yuan-denominated futures contracts, known as the petroyuan, in the pricing model of Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Aramco.”

China and Saudi Arabia have been talking about yuan-based oil contracts for six years. But Saudi Arabia’s frustration with the US has apparently accelerated those talks. According to the WSJ, the Saudi government is increasingly unhappy with decades-old US security commitments to defend the kingdom along with the Biden administration’s attempt to reinstitute the Iran nuclear deal.

The Chinese rolled out yuan-based oil contracts in 2018. They have been modestly successful, but haven’t dented the dollar’s dominance. If Saudi Arabia begins doing business in yuan, it would be a kick in the gut for the dollar.

And it would be a boon for China. The Chinese would love to limit their exposure to the dollar.

Needless to say, US officials are not pleased with this development. A senior US official called the idea of the Saudis selling oil to China in yuan “highly volatile and aggressive” and “not very likely.”

Calling the move “aggressive” is ironic given how the US has used the dollar as a weapon for decades.

But this could be nothing but talk. Selling oil in yuan would come with some risks to the Saudi economy. The Saudi riyal is pegged to the dollar. Prince Mohammed’s aides have reportedly warned him of unpredictable economic damage should the country hastily start selling millions of barrels of oil for yuan.

Regardless, it’s no surprise that the Chinese and Saudis have ramped up talks in recent weeks. The weaponization of the dollar has been on full display.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the US cut some Russian banks, including the central bank, off from the SWIFT payment system.

SWIFT  stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The system enables financial institutions to send and receive information about financial transactions in a secure, standardized environment. Since the dollar serves as the world reserve currency, SWIFT facilitates the international dollar system.

SWIFT and dollar dominance gives the US a great deal of leverage over other countries.

But that leverage depends on the dollar’s role as the reserve currency. It shouldn’t shock us that we’re seeing blowback from the US using greenbacks as a foreign policy carrot and stick.

A drop in the demand for dollars would be bad news for a US government that depends on dollar demand to fund its out-of-control spending. Imagine a world in which the Chinese didn’t need dollars.

China ranks as the biggest foreign holder of US debt. If it continues to divest itself of dollars, who will pick up the slack? The Federal Reserve has been buying Treasuries hand over fist for the last two years, keeping its big fat thumb on the bond market. But it’s tapering purchases and supposedly planning on shrinking its balance sheet. If global demand for Treasuries drop precipitously — and it would in a world without the petrodollar — the US government would either have to drastically cut spending or the Fed would have to continue printing money to monetize the debt.

Even if this is nothing but talk, it underscores the fact that the dollar is on shaky ground. US policymakers would be wise to consider future dollar weaponization carefully. (read more)

Bloomberg Informs Dumb Retards That Saudis Selling Oil in Yuan Is No Big Deal

Saudi Arabia Considers Accepting Yuan Instead of Dollars for Chinese Oil Sales

"The Saudis are angry…over the Biden administration’s attempt to strike a deal with Iran…were shocked by the precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan."

You did it Joe. https://t.co/JWO2AInRr0

— Andrew Clark (@AndrewHClark) March 15, 2022

This is the top story when you look for what the mainstream media is saying about reports that Saudi Arabia is considering selling oil to China in yuan – from the financial geniuses at Bloomberg.

I’m not a racist or anything, but I did have to chuckle a bit when I clicked that headline and found that this face was laying down the hard facts for me:

I don’t really understand what it even means that it is “symbolic.”

The article is not even remotely serious. Nor is the video with that talking gorilla.

What they say is that it’s intended to “send a political message,” and this is somehow different from “drastically altering the global economic landscape.”

One point that is made is that Saudi’s currency is pegged to the US dollar, so they wouldn’t really want to collapse the US dollar. However, that isn’t really how fiat currency works. If the yuan became the primary currency in which oil is traded, it would just mean the Saudis would peg their currency to the yuan. The value of any fiat currency is based on the productivity of the nation – except in the case of the dollar, where they are able to back their currency with debt they are able to export due to their status as a global superpower with a formerly absolute ability to manipulate not only the global economy but global events in general.

Some experts on the topic would say that the US dollar hegemony is backed by the US military’s dominance. If that is true, then the Afghan withdrawal and this current lunatic debacle in the Ukraine would both be signs that the dollar is on the ropes.

Most Americans don’t really understand the importance of dollar hegemony. It’s effectively the only reason that the US is not a third world country. The stock market’s value and the value of property and other assets is a result of money being sucked out of the global economy, directed into Wall Street, via the dollar swindle.

I Don’t Know Who’s Great Resetting Who Anymore

India is preparing to make non-dollar oil trades with Russia in the wake of US sanctions. Ultimately, those trades will be made in yuan. All global trade between countries not controlled by the US will be made in yuan.

But the Gulf states are the big one, and if they decide to go all in with China, then the entire Western economic order collapses, almost immediately.

As far as I can tell, this is all more or less a done deal. It’s just a matter of watching it play out. I don’t see any real options for the West at this point – certainly not for America, which can’t really recover from anything at all after having gone all in on crushing the souls of its core producers – WHITE MEN – and replacing them with diversity.

It’s also incredible, as I’ve stated repeatedly through this process, that the US has targeted the Russian people as a race as a result of this border skirmish in the Ukraine. I had just assumed that the plan – whether it would work or not – was to use the Ukraine to try to drain Russia, then push for a color revolution inside of Russia. But that is now totally off the table, in large part as a result of targeting sanctions at normal Russian people.

The only possible move at this point is to start a real war with Russia, and then presumably China at the same time. I just don’t see any other move. Maybe US/NATO still has enough military superiority that if they went right now they could pull that off? Honestly, I have no idea.

Basically, I stand behind all of the core predictions I’ve been making for years now – one of which was that the US elite is actually too cowardly to start a nuclear war. The people claiming that we could win such a conflict are the same people who said that the Kabul government would stand for at least six months – they were off by roughly five months and 29 days.

So if you’re a pedophile or other pervert in Washington, or a deranged old man, then do you really have the nerve to bet that the US can win a nuclear war, that you won’t get nuked, and that if you do get nuked you can escape to an underground bunker and live out the rest of your life in a Fallout-style Vault?

[...] We will see if hubris can trump rational self-interest and kick off WWIII. It’s certainly possible. But I’d say the chances are lower than 20%. I think there’s an 80% chance that the people in Washington are going to keep choking, and when the dollar collapses, they will just try to maneuver into becoming a third world type elite class.

(For those who don’t know, third world countries have massive peasant populations, and tiny ultra-wealthy elites who live in castles and drive around the crowded streets in Lamborghinis. No peasant will touch them, as they all know that the police exist for the sole purpose of protecting the elite.)

This is among the many reasons I’ve told people to move out of the cities. If the American elite do manage to transform themselves into a third world style elite, there is simply no way they would be able to maintain control over the vast landmass of the US. It’s too big for the kind of authoritarianism that is necessary to sustain a third world elite on a third world budget. They will strike deals to buy goods from farmers, but they won’t attempt to govern them. They might try to maintain control of the land between the big cities on the coasts, making the map look like the 2000 AD map.

The other thing is that there will necessarily be massive Chinese economic influence.

Thus far, China hasn’t had any involvement at all in anything political in any of its client states, unless it directly relates to economics. In fact, their political influence is ridiculously low, as we saw with the recent (and really ongoing) debacle in Burma. If Burma had been a US client state, they would have sent in advisors if not peacekeepers to figure something out. But China did not even really address the political crisis in the country, despite having invested in it.

The same is true in Africa, Latin America, and other places where the Chinese deal – they have no desire to even take interest in domestic politics. This is obviously in stark contrast to the US putting sanctions on countries that don’t allow so-called “anal marriage.”

So, if we consider that, it’s likely that the current US elite wouldn’t be able to manage their positions very long, as they would be incapable of managing an economic relationship with China, and not serve as a good place for investment. American farmers could start selling to China rather than Mega-City One.

Ir’s all theoretical, of course. But on some level, there is real math involved, in the same way that there are finite moves that can be made in a chess game – and with every move that is made, fewer moves are possible.

With every turn, there are fewer possible moves.

For example, in this game, black has 37 possible moves.

This is the underlying concept of psychohistory in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. I watched some of the horrible race/gender swapped Apple TV Foundation abomination recently, and though I’ve yet to go back and read the books – something it made me want to do – it did cause me to do some internet research on the concept of psychohistory (and by that, I mean what people usually mean when they say “I did research on the internet” – I read the Wikipedia entry). Asimov’s psychohistory is very similar to what I just described with the chess moves. You calculate the probability that any historically relevant group or institution will make a specific move, and you determine the probability of historical outcomes.

The thing is, we are pretty late game here, in terms of the American Empire.

There are not really very many moves left. Especially after the last few weeks.

If the current government would have just met the demands of Putin with regards to Ukrainian neutrality, they’d have several more moves than they have now. Even after Putin had invaded, they could have made very different decisions.

But as of March 16, 2022 – the moves are pretty much just either:

• Go full WWIII basically immediately – using some gassing hoax, and maybe a fake bombing in Poland, or
• Loss of dollar dominance and rapid decline into third world status as China assumes the role of dominant global superpower

I’m somewhat confident that if I was the age I am right now in 1999, I could have plotted this out. But at this point, if you can’t see the collapse of the empire coming into view, you really aren’t paying attention – or, like most, you’re in a state of denial.

I would argue that even very intelligent and competent people couldn’t salvage things at this point.

If I was made dictator tomorrow, I would immediately surrender Ukraine and remove all sanctions on Russia, then call up for negotiations on the surrender of Taiwan and the South China Sea in exchange for trade guarantees and peace with China. Then I would make drastic social changes in the US, restoring national pride and white heterosexual male identity, and begin a project to rebuild the manufacturing and energy industries while we have the lifeline from China.

But that would not be a plan for world domination, that would be the reestablishing of the 19th century model of a multipolar world. Everything about the current thinking in the entire West is still based around the whole “end of history” global government scheme, and there is just zero chance they are capable of completely transforming their thought processes. It’s either pull the trigger on a last ditch effort to establish this one-world order, or to choke, and fall back, with a bunch of yes men and outright morons explaining it all away as being part of the plan. (read more)

Say Hello to Russian Gold and Chinese Petroyuan

It was a long time coming, but finally some key lineaments of the multipolar world’s new foundations are being revealed.

On Friday, after a videoconference meeting, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and China agreed to design the mechanism for an independent international monetary and financial system. The EAEU consists of Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus and Armenia, is establishing free trade deals with other Eurasian nations, and is progressively interconnecting with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

For all practical purposes, the idea comes from Sergei Glazyev, Russia’s foremost independent economist, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin and the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the regulatory body of the EAEU.

Glazyev’s central role in devising the new Russian and Eurasian economic/financial strategy has been examined here. He saw the western financial squeeze on Moscow coming light-years before others.

Quite diplomatically, Glazyev attributed the fruition of the idea to “the common challenges and risks associated with the global economic slowdown and restrictive measures against the EAEU states and China.”

Translation: as China is as much a Eurasian power as Russia, they need to coordinate their strategies to bypass the US unipolar system.

The Eurasian system will be based on “a new international currency,” most probably with the yuan as reference, calculated as an index of the national currencies of the participating countries, as well as commodity prices. The first draft will be already discussed by the end of the month.

The Eurasian system is bound to become a serious alternative to the US dollar, as the EAEU may attract not only nations that have joined BRI (Kazakhstan, for instance, is a member of both) but also the leading players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as ASEAN. West Asian actors – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will be inevitably interested.

In the medium to long term, the spread of the new system will translate into the weakening of the Bretton Woods system, which even serious US market players/strategists admit is rotten from the inside. The US dollar and imperial hegemony are facing stormy seas.

Show me that frozen gold

Meanwhile, Russia has a serious problem to tackle. This past weekend, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov confirmed that half of Russia’s gold and foreign reserves have been frozen by unilateral sanctions. It boggles the mind that Russian financial experts have placed a great deal of the nation’s wealth where it can be easily accessed – and even confiscated – by the “Empire of Lies” (copyright Putin).

At first it was not exactly clear what Siluanov had meant. How could the Central Bank’s Elvira Nabiulina and her team let half of foreign reserves and even gold be stored in Western banks and/or vaults? Or is this some sneaky diversionist tactic by Siluanov?

No one is better equipped to answer these questions than the inestimable Michael Hudson, author of the recent revised edition of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of the American Empire.

Hudson was quite frank: “When I first heard the word ‘frozen,’ I thought that this meant that Russia was not going to expend its precious gold reserves on supporting the ruble, trying to fight against a Soros-style raid from the west. But now the word ‘frozen’ seems to have meant that Russia had sent it abroad, outside of its control.”

“It looks like at least as of last June, all Russian gold was kept in Russia itself. At the same time it would have been natural to have kept securities and bank deposits in the United States and Britain, because that is where most intervention in world foreign exchange markets occurs,” Hudson added,

Essentially, it’s all still up in the air: “My first reading assumed that Russia must be doing something smart. If it was smart to move gold abroad, perhaps it was doing what other central banks do: ‘lend” it to speculators, for an interest payment or fee. Until Russia tells the world where its gold was put, and why, we can’t fathom it. Was it in the Bank of England – even after England confiscated Venezuela’s gold? Was it in the New York Fed – even after the Fed confiscated Afghanistan’s reserves?”

So far, there has been no extra clarification either from Siluanov or Nabiulina. Scenarios swirl about a string of deportations to northern Siberia for national treason. Hudson adds important elements to the puzzle:

“If [the reserves] are frozen, why is Russia paying interest on its foreign debt falling due? It can direct the “freezer’ to pay, to shift the blame for default. It can talk about Chase Manhattan’s freezing of Iran’s bank account from which Iran sought to pay interest on its dollar-denominated debt. It can insist that any payments by NATO countries be settled in advance by physical gold. Or it can land paratroopers on the Bank of England, and recover gold – sort of like Goldfinger at Fort Knox. What is important is for Russia to explain what happened and how it was attacked, as a warning to other countries.”

As a clincher, Hudson could not but wink at Glazyev: “Maybe Russia should appoint a non-pro-westerner at the Central Bank.”

The petrodollar game-changer

It’s tempting to read into Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s words at the diplomatic summit in Antalya last Thursday a veiled admission that Moscow may not have been totally prepared for the heavy financial artillery deployed by the Americans:

“We will solve the problem – and the solution will be to no longer depend on our western partners, be it governments or companies that are acting as tools of western political aggression against Russia instead of pursuing the interests of their businesses. We will make sure that we never again find ourselves in a similar situation and that neither some Uncle Sam nor anybody else can make decisions aimed at destroying our economy. We will find a way to eliminate this dependence. We should have done it long ago.”

So, “long ago” starts now. And one of its planks will be the Eurasian financial system. Meanwhile, “the market” (as in, the American speculative casino) has “judged” (according to its self-made oracles) that Russian gold reserves – the ones that stayed in Russia – cannot support the ruble.

That’s not the issue – on several levels. The self-made oracles, brainwashed for decades, believe that the Hegemon dictates what “the market” does. That’s mere propaganda. The crucial fact is that in the new, emerging paradigm, NATO nations amount to at best 15 percent of the world’s population. Russia won’t be forced to practice autarky because it does not need to: most of the world – as we’ve seen represented in the hefty non-sanctioning nation list – is ready to do business with Moscow.

Iran has shown how to do it. Persian Gulf traders confirmed to The Cradle that Iran is selling no less than 3 million barrels of oil a day even now, with no signed JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, currently under negotiation in Vienna). Oil is relabeled, smuggled, and transferred from tankers in the dead of night.

Another example: the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), a huge refiner, just bought 3 million barrels of Russian Urals from trader Vitol for delivery in May. There are no sanctions on Russian oil – at least not yet.

Washington’s reductionist, Mackinderesque plan is to manipulate Ukraine as a disposable pawn to go scorched-earth on Russia, and then hit China. Essentially, divide-and-rule to smash not only one but two peer competitors in Eurasia who are advancing in lockstep as comprehensive strategic partners.

As Hudson sees it: “China is in the cross-hairs, and what happened to Russia is a dress rehearsal for what can happen to China. Best to break sooner than later under these conditions. Because the leverage is highest now.”

All the blather about “crashing Russian markets,” ending foreign investment, destroying the ruble, a “full trade embargo,” expelling Russia from “the community of nations,” and so forth –that’s for the zombified galleries. Iran has been dealing with the same thing for four decades, and survived.

Historical poetic justice, as Lavrov intimated, now happens to rule that Russia and Iran are about to sign a very important agreement, which may likely be an equivalent of the Iran-China strategic partnership. The three main nodes of Eurasia integration are perfecting their interaction on the go, and sooner rather than later, may be utilizing a new, independent monetary and financial system.

But there’s more poetic justice on the way, revolving around the ultimate game-changer. And it came much sooner than we all thought.

Saudi Arabia is considering accepting Chinese yuan – and not US dollars – for selling oil to China. Translation: Beijing told Riyadh this is the new groove. The end of the petrodollar is at hand – and that is the certified nail in the coffin of the indispensable Hegemon.

Meanwhile, there’s a mystery to be solved: where is that frozen Russian gold? (read more)

EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Report Shows Harvard Professor Fabricated Data

Karlstack has obtained a leaked document that shows a professor of political science at Harvard allegedly fabricated data in order to prove that white people feel threatened by minorities.

This leaked report was brought forward as a complaint in 2018 against Harvard professor Ryan Enos by an anonymous complainant whose identity is  is protected by The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

A Harvard spokesperson has confirmed that this report sparked an internal and non-public  investigation by Harvard's Committee on Professional Conduct over "research integrity concerns" relating to Enos' 2016 paper "What the demolition of public housing teaches us about the impact of racial threat on political behavior"  published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS).

Harvard says that their Committee on Professional Conduct "readily dismissed" this document after reviewing it. They refuse to elaborate on why it was dismissed. "No comment," said the Harvard spokesperson.

Here are all the emails between me and AJPS. At the time of this writing, AJPS is refusing to accept a complaint from me. Read the emails to see why.

Here are all the emails between me and Harvard.

This previously suppressed document concludes that Enos' data was "mathematically impossible" and manipulated "beyond any reasonable doubt … in favor of author’s preferred theory and hypotheses." Enos' preferred theory in this instance is "racial threat theory," which is closely related to "critical race theory," and attempts to quantify the degree to which white people feel threatened by minorities. To study this, Enos examined the demolition of public housing project in Chicago in the early 2000's and concludes that it resulted in white people voting less conservatively.

The main problem with his analysis — among several problems — is that  800+ precincts in Chicago are missing from the data, with no justification given. It is possible/probable that Enos deleted this data by hand.  Many of these deleted precincts are in Republican leaning areas, meaning Enos' conclusions about voting patterns would likely would not hold if they had they not been deleted.

All versions of Enos’ working paper can be found online. All versions… except for his PhD dissertation which is based on this data. This dissertation has been scrubbed from the internet.  "At the request of the author, this graduate work is not available to view or purchase," says ProQuest, the website which hosted Enos' dissertation.

I spoke with Kathleen Dolan, who is  co-editor in chief of the AJPS and a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She says that "at no time has anyone brought allegations of misconduct about Dr. Enos’ 2016 article to us. Neither of us was aware of the document you provided, nor were we aware of the internal Harvard investigation."

Again, AJPS is refusing to investigate now that it has been brought to their attention.

Harvard, therefore, was aware of these allegations in 2018 and AJPS was not. It is unclear if Harvard had any ethical obligation to inform the AJPS that they were aware of formal and credible reports of research misconduct at the journal. A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on any such ethical obligation. “No comment,” said the spokesperson.

"There are very strong incentives to fudge data in the field of political science," says Jacob Shapiro, a political science professor at Princeton. "Data fabrication is theft: its money, its career advancement, its life satisfaction, it's bad. It's bad. I believe there need to be sanctions, the harshest possible sanctions, for scholars who are proven to engage in data fabrication. There should be no scholars who engage in data fabrication at our top institutions or any institutions."

Michael Smith was the Harvard Dean in charge of disciplining Enos in 2018. He also chaired the committee on appointments and promotions which granted Enos tenure in 2018 as well. It would have been VERY embarrassing for Smith to grant a professor tenure and then immediately find him guilty of fabricating data. Hence, this was suppressed. The person promoted to replace Smith was Claudine Gay. Sources tell me that she is heavily involved in suppressing this as well.

A Second Data Quirk Emerges. Where does it end?

Upon investigating the first Enos dataset, it quickly came apparent that a second Enos dataset was possibly flawed. In 2014, Enos conducted another study that shows white people are afraid of minorities. To do this, he studied the views of commuters on trains in Boston in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The Washington Post covered this story at the time. I have reached out to PNAS. They are currently investigating.

Enos uses survey data that contains IP addresses.

• Very few of the IP addresses are in Boston/Cambridge.

• Multiple IPs in Cambridge used among respondents were on different trains nowhere near Cambridge. The commutes do not make sense.

• There are also plenty of infants and toddlers in the dataset, which is weird, considering 1-year-olds typically don’t have strong opinions on immigration.

• The raw data is missing. This data has been processed.

There are several more weird things about this trains data. It needs to be investigated further. The whole dataset/paper stinks. Unfortunately, upon being notified of potential data issues, Enos deleted the data in an attempt to scrub it from the internet.

It should be noted that this PNAS paper had already been “corrected” once already (see Retraction Watch) and debunked (see van Hoorn (2014)).

Enos' book  (The space between us) published by Cambridge University press (CUP)  is reprinting both the AJPS and the PNAS article, as two chapters. The rest of the book is based on the results in these studies. So the entire book also potentially relies on fabricated data and may need to be retracted along with the articles. 

It's now possible/likely that a full professor at Harvard's 3 most influential and highly cited works (AJPS, PNAS, CUP) — plus his PhD dissertation! — are fabricated.

Is this enough to retract the articles? Is this enough to revoke tenure? Probably. I think Enos’ fate is a foregone conclusion. The wheels are already in motion. I am more interested in what will happen to the Harvard Deans (Smith + Gay) who helped cover this up. (read more)

Suspect in deadly shooting spree of DC, NYC homeless people arrested

A suspect in the serial killing and shooting of homeless people in the Big Apple and Washington, DC, was arrested early Tuesday in the capital, police announced.

The gunman – identified by a high-ranking police official as Gerald Brevard III, 30 – was busted when investigators tracked him down at a DC gas station, officials said.

“ARRESTED: Early this AM, law enforcement arrested the suspect in Washington, DC,” the DC Police Department announced at 5:40 a.m.

“He is currently being interviewed at our Homicide Branch. Additional information will be forthcoming. Thanks to the community for all your tips.”

The arrest came just hours after the force released clear facial photos of the prime suspect who has been tied to two murders and three attempted homicides targeting homeless men in both cities.

The same man was linked to both cities after chilling video footage caught the cold-blooded slaying of one of two homeless people shot in Soho on Saturday. 

A Metropolitan Police Department homicide captain — who used to live in the Big Apple — saw surveillance photos and realized they looked like the man his department was also chasing.

Police believe the same handgun was used in all the shootings, with ballistics linking at least one shooting in each city. (read more)

"You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."

— Ayn Rand

The Sanction Backlash Will Push The 'West' To Accept Russia's Demands

"For years the U.S. committed policies that have left a lot of countries grumbling. Now, as the U.S. needs support to milden the consequences of 'punishing' Russia, those policies come back to bite. So will the secondary effects of sanctions the 'west' has imposed on Russia.

Today one report calls news of US controlled bio-weapon laboratories in Ukraine a 'debunked conspiracy' while other news says that Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland tells Senators that she is very concerned that 'research materials' from these laboratories could fall into Russian hands. If the 'research material' is not weapon grade why is she concerned about it?

That does not fit well with the ongoing anti-Russian propaganda campaign.

Nor do these maps.

The first shows the countries which banned Russian airplanes from their airspace. Russia in turn denied its airspace to operators from those countries. It will cost quite a bit for U.S. and EU airlines as their flight times and cost to and from Asia, which typically fly through Russian airspace, will now increase. Carriers from Asian countries will now easily out-compete U.S. and European airlines on these routes.

The second map shows those countries which enacted sanctions against Russia. The secondary effects of sanctions are likely to hurt these countries as much as they hurt Russia. The absence of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Central and South American countries is quite telling.

It does not look like 'the world' or the 'international community' is backing the 'west'.

The U.S. also sanctioned all imports of oil products from Russia. President Biden has blamed Russia for the price increase that will inevitably follow. I don't believe that mid-term voters will accept that reasoning. European countries can not follow that step as their economies depend of imports of oil and gas from Russia and will continue to do so for years to come.

In a move that must have been quite humiliating for the White House the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE declined to take calls from the U.S. president. They want the U.S. to designate the Houthi movement in Yemen, which they have been unsuccessful to suppress, a terrorist group:

One hopes that the Biden administration does not fall for these disgusting bribery schemes but he has backed himself into a corner, cutting off Russian oil to punish Putin for a humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, with no alternative but to horsetrade with autocrats over the fate of Yemenis a half a world away. If this is geopolitics, heaven forgive us.

I don't think that the above is the only request the Saudis and UAE leaders will have. They are now in a situation in which they can demand ever more.

Likewise humiliating is the administration's opening of talks with Venezuela which it had sanctioned all around in its attempt to regime change the country. Caracas has released two U.S. nationals from prison. It is willing to talk. But before providing oil to the U.S. market it will demand the lifting of all sanctions and the return of all its assets the U.S. and UK have confiscated. Biden will have difficulties to find a Congress majority in support of such steps.

The return of the nuclear deal with Iran, which would enable more oil output, hangs in balance as Russia demands sanction exemptions for its trade with Iran.

The U.S. had attempted to press Poland to deliver its old Mig-29 fighter jets to the Ukraine. In Russia's eyes that would have been a direct Polish aggression against it. Warsaw found a smart way to avoid that. It offered to deliver the jets to a U.S. airbase in Germany. The tar baby would thereby stick to the U.S. itself. The Pentagon declined to accept that. The jet transfer is now most likely dead.

The U.S. and Europe are only starting to feel the secondary consequences of the all out economic war they hastily initiated against Russia. The war will cause recessions not only in Russia but also all over the 'west'. This while Russia has yet to announce its counter sanctions. There are many steps Russia could take to hurt the 'west' by withholding this or that resource. It is likely to start slowly to then increase the pressure step by step.

It seems that there was given no thought at all about the secondary effects the 'western' sanctions would have.

Meanwhile the Russian intervention in the Ukraine continues at a moderate pace. Russia is not in a hurry as Zelensky is making noise about 'compromises':

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won't accept Russia's demands for ending the war unconditionally, but he's open to trying to find a compromise that could include not pursuing NATO membership.
...
Along with "cooling down" to the idea of joining NATO, Zelensky told ABC News that there's room for negotiating on the occupied territories and unrecognized republics.

Russia responded in kind:

Moscow is not aiming to overthrow the current leadership in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, amid the ongoing military campaign in the neighboring state.

“Its objectives don’t include occupation of Ukraine, destruction of its statehood, or the toppling of the current government. It’s not directed against the civilian population,” Zakharova told reporters at a regular press conference on Wednesday.

The spokeswoman reiterated that Moscow wants to defend the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which broke away from Ukraine shortly after the 2014 coup in Kiev. She added that Russia seeks the “demilitarization and denazification” of Ukraine.

It will be interesting to see if the U.S. allows Zelensky to go further down that path. The secondary effects the sanctions will have for the 'west' are likely to eventually lead to that. (read more)

Climbing the Escalation Ladder in the Economic War With Russia… Here’s the Nuclear Option

The escalation ladder is a concept to describe how the severity of a military conflict can increase.

At the very top of the escalation ladder is all-out nuclear war.

While there are numerous countries with nuclear weapons, Russia and China are the only ones with sophisticated enough arsenals to go toe-to-toe with the US up to the top of the escalation ladder.

In other words, the US can’t obtain escalation dominance against Russia or China because they can match each escalation up to all-out nuclear war—the very top of the ladder.

For this reason, these countries are deterred from getting into a kinetic conflict with one another.

It’s also why the US military doesn’t hesitate to bomb countries like Libya, Iraq, Syria, or Afghanistan. It has little to fear because it knows these countries can’t climb very high in the escalation ladder.

This concept is well-understood in military conflicts.

However, the same dynamic exists in an economic war, and it’s far less understood by governments (and investors).

That’s why neither the US nor Russia are not deterred and are climbing up the economic escalation ladder and hurdling towards an increasingly imminent catastrophe.

The Economic War Escalates

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US government and EU have launched an unprecedented economic war… with seeming little thought on how it all ends.

Russia is not a tiny, feeble country that can’t punch back.

Even though many people don’t realize it, Russia can escalate to the top of the economic escalation ladder. Here’s why…

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, lumber, wheat, fertilizer, and palladium (a crucial component in cars).

It is the second-largest exporter of oil and aluminum and the third-largest exporter of nickel and coal.

Russia is a major producer and processor of uranium for nuclear power plants. Enriched uranium from Russia and its allies provides electricity to 20% of the homes in the US.

Aside from China, Russia produces more gold than any other country, accounting for more than 10% of global production.

These are just a handful of examples. There are many strategic commodities that Russia dominates.

In short, Russia is not just an oil and gas powerhouse but a commodity powerhouse.

Europe cannot survive without Russian commodities.

Taking Russian commodities off of global markets would cause an across-the-board price shock that would decimate financial markets, banks, and practically every industry. Moreover, Russia also has an economic nuclear option that could blow up the Western financial system overnight.

In short, Russia has powerful cards to play.

Just like in a kinetic war, Russia can match US moves to escalate an economic war to the top of the escalation ladder.

But unlike a kinetic war, neither side is deterred. On the contrary, it seems all but inevitable that things will escalate from here, which makes the situation incredibly dangerous.

Where Are We Now?

The US has sanctioned the Russian central bank, making it illegal for any American to engage with it, the finance ministry, or the national wealth fund.

The US and European governments froze the US dollar and euro reserves of Russia—the accumulated savings of the nation—worth around $300 billion.

Certain Russian banks have been kicked out of SWIFT, the system to send international wire transfers.

A stampede of Western companies have left Russia and are banning average Russian citizens from using their platforms.

Visa, MasterCard, and American Express have cut off Russia from their networks.

The US government banned all imports of Russian oil.

In return, Russia has matched these moves with defensive maneuvers and escalations of its own.

Moscow has banned the export of rocket engines to the US, with an official saying, “In a situation like this we can’t supply the United States with our world’s best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks.”

Russia and China have live alternatives to SWIFT to facilitate international financial transactions, which limits the effect of being kicked out of SWIFT.

Russian banks started issuing credit and debit cards linked to China’s global payment processing network UnionPay.

Russia has announced, or already is, doing business with China, India, Iran, Turkey, and other countries in local currencies instead of the US dollar, neutralizing much of the effect of sanctions.

In perhaps the most significant escalatory move, the Russian government has allowed all external debt obtained from unfriendly countries—estimated to be over $400 billion— to be redenominated in rubles.

As a result, instead of paying back creditors in the US and Europe in dollars and euros at Western banks, Russian companies can now repay their external debts by depositing rubles on their creditor’s behalf in Russian banks, which are inaccessible to them because of sanctions.

This move forces the US and EU to either ease sanctions so that the estimated $400 billion in external debt can be repaid or give massive losses to Western banks and other creditors.

So, that’s where things stand now.

It’s worth noting that Europe is still paying for Russian energy, and Moscow is still delivering it.

Nonetheless, Russia and the US are climbing the economic escalation ladder, with neither side showing any sign of slowing down. However, we are still several destructive steps away from the top.

What Comes Next

Putin recently announced a forthcoming ban on exports of certain commodities to certain unfriendly countries, with details coming soon. Given Russia’s dominance in the commodity markets, such a move will be significant.

A logical next step Russia could take if the US and EU increase their sanctions would be to force Europe to pay for its energy imports in rubles.

European buyers would have to first buy rubles with their euros and use them to pay for Russian gas, oil, and other exports. Such a move would neutralize the entire sanctions regime because it would force Europeans to deal with the sanctioned Russian central bank or get cut off from crucial commodities.

The Europeans have no alternative to Russian energy and would have no choice but to comply.

Moscow could implement its economic nuclear option if the US really pushes Russia to the point where it has nothing left to lose. That would be demanding payment for oil and other commodities in gold. Since Russia is such a dominant player in the commodity markets, it could dictate this.

Such a move would send gold skyrocketing and blow up the entire Western financial system overnight. Moreover, the dollar and euro would likely suffer an enormous loss in purchasing power as commodities would be repriced in gold.

That’s Russia’s financial nuclear option, and if the US continues up the escalation ladder, this is where it will ultimately lead.

With neither side backing down, escalation appears inevitable.

Editor’s Note: The US government is overextending itself by interfering in every corner of the globe. It’s all financed by massive amounts of money printing. However, the next financial crisis could end the whole charade soon.

The truth is, we’re on the cusp of a global economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. And most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming.  (read more)

Total Cost of U.S. Wars Since 2001
$7,588,070,333,179

SANCTIONS WILL IMPOVERISH AMERICANS AND EUROPEANS

The system-globalists don’t recognise the legitimacy of Russian strategic interests, or the legitimacy of anybody’s strategic interests. Globalists do not have security concerns in that way. Many of them even believe their own hollow rhetoric, that they are spreading freedom and democracy, even after these last two years of experimentation in forced vaccination and intermittent mass house arrest. Even if they don’t believe all of that about democracy, they nevertheless imagine that they are missionaries of light and goodness to all peoples everywhere, and that human potential will only be fully realised, when every last Russian is on Facebook and subscribed to Amazon Prime.

The global American empire doesn’t invade; that is not what systems do. It assimilates. It is basically a borg that imposes economic and political constraints on an ever expanding expanse of the globe, which progressively fatten, distract and deracinate populations, with a view towards blending them into the same shallow multinational consumerist soup. Their plan was to make Ukraine part of the borg, and in this way further encroach upon Russia. Russia responded in political fashion, by taking up arms. Because the western borg never knows when to stop, Ukraine will now be destroyed and probably partitioned, as a means of keeping it forever outside the western globalist fold.

However much the globalists like the idea of encircling Russia with NATO, in their saner moments they’re not actually willing to risk nuclear war to defend the easternmost reaches of Europe. For the globalists, Ukraine was just a pawn. After they finish throwing their tantrum, they’ll go pick another proxy fight somewhere else, and ruin some other country; and they’ll also continue to grind away at unaligned unassimilated internal dissidents within their borders too. They make no distinctions here.

Western media and politicians don’t want to explain the cause of the Ukrainian war, because it is a defeat that they brought upon themselves. This is why they have chosen instead to portray Putin as some kind of crazy lunatic, in the mould of a Kim Jong-un or a Saddam Hussein. That is precisely wrong: Those are unpredictable tin-pot dictators who command paper-tiger armies. The Russians are a nuclear-armed global force, and the Ukrainian war is not something that Putin himself dreamed up yesterday. It surely enjoys substantial support within the Russian political and military establishment.  (source)

Did Corona Kill Climate Change?

Preliminary thoughts on Corona and Climatism as competing ideological systems, and why that might be very bad.

Conventional wisdom holds that global elites will pivot to climate change, now that Corona is ending. I’m starting to think that this might not happen and that we’ve misinterpreted the ideological significance of Corona. Perhaps Corona happened because climate change was not good enough – because, as a politically orienting ideological system, it had failed to mobilise institutions and populations in the right way, and had entered the first stages of decline. Perhaps, in the coming decades, there will be other hysterias, but no real ideological push on the climate front ever again. I’m not saying the climatologists, their institutions and associated grifts will disappear tomorrow. In any scenario, they’ll plug on for a long time. What I am imagining, though, is a future in which they’ll be steadily deprived of inertia, and ultimately fade into the background, like the war on terror.

First, to disarm some objections: Here I’m only talking about the ideological and political prescriptions that fall under the ‘climate change’ heading. We might call this phenomenon Climatism, just as I use ‘Corona’ to denote the broader political and ideological phenomenon surrounding the SARS-CovV-2 pandemic. Climatism is an ideological superstructure that rests on a foundation of empirical observations and scientific theory about the earth’s atmosphere and temperature. For the sake of argument, I’ll assume that this empirical substructure is mostly true and accurately portrayed. You can be sceptical of the Corona response without denying that there is a virus, and you can be sceptical of Climatism while accepting that the earth is getting warmer.

Importantly, ceding all that ground doesn’t return Climatism as the only or the most necessary political response. You could imagine many solutions: Nations which accept that carbon emissions are trapping greenhouse gasses and heating the earth unsustainably might engage in warfare to destroy the industrial capacity of rival nations, or they might vastly expand the generation of nuclear power, or they might count on technological developments to counter the impact of higher temperatures in the future. In the same way, mass lockdowns, mask mandates and universal vaccination are not the only or even the most obvious response to a pandemic respiratory virus. All other respiratory viruses in history were met with very different policies. Corona and Climatism both claim to be rooted in the science, but that should not distract us from the obvious truth that they are contingent cultural and ideological phenomena.

This makes it particularly intriguing, that Corona and Climatism should have so many commonalities. (read more)

The Media Can't Stop Spreading Misinformation about Florida

Their latest target is a bill about childhood education

Obviously I have written extensively about COVID and COVID related policies, but with the broader goal of undermining the veneer of infallibility that the media and institutions are allowed to maintain.

In general, I strongly dislike the use of the word “misinformation” when discussing substantive issues because it’s so often used as a shorthand to describe “information that may be true but is inconvenient.” In many ways, the debate over “misinformation” can be broken down into power structures.

The most likely spreaders of “misinformation” are those with power; the government and the media. While an individual with a Twitter account may make claims that are not objectively true, there is an enormous difference between that and the official social media account of The White House openly disseminating misleading guidance and pseudoscience.

Because the government and media outlets are supposed to be viewed as trustworthy, reliable sources of information, they are the sources that are most likely to be guilty of sharing “misinformation.”

This has been evident given their dramatic failures with regards to COVID policy and the media’s endless praise of lockdown countries that they could frame as opposing Trump’s “anti-science” rhetoric.

Allowing them to continue spreading misinformation unchecked is what has lead to the disturbing statements from the CDC director implying that masks will be brought back indefinitely:

Allowing them to maintain policies based on inaccuracies will have tremendous negative side effects going forward. Revolving school masking, vaccine passports or other interventions could become permanent fixtures of daily life directly due to actual “misinformation.”

Debunking government and media misrepresentations of reality was the actual basis of my book, “Unmasked” — and we’re seeing this play out again in Florida.

The latest controversy revolves around Florida’s “Parental Rights in Education” Bill that was recently passed by the state legislature.

The text of the bill is easily readable online and is remarkably short and easy to understand, yet despite this convenience and short length, too many have learned about the bill from media reports that have mislabeled and misstated what the bill actually says.

The section that has generated the most controversy reads as follows:

prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels or in a specified manner

This text has led to a firestorm of media coverage and predictable outrage and purposefully misleading tweets from the President and the official White House Twitter account:

It’s led to student protests with the Press Secretary openly lying about the bill and the motivations behind it.

Media reports have been almost entirely negative and they immediately adopted the opponent’s preferred framing and language to sway the public’s perception of the bill.

And as you might have noticed from the Disney headline, the incessant media outrage has required corporations to make sweeping, dramatic statements to placate the mob of activists who consistently believe the media’s purposeful misinformation.

In the same disturbing trend as allowing the pro-mask lobby to frame The Science™ as settled, which encourages permanent masking, we can determine that allowing the media and politicians to rename the bill in their own interest will lead to extensive, long lasting damage.

It’s important at this point out in detail what the bill actually says about this issue:

Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

Kindergarten through grade 3. That’s what this is all about. That’s it.

The bill is designed to limit the ability of teachers or outside educators to instruct kids aged ~ 5 - 8 on sexual orientation or gender identity.

It clearly says nothing about a student’s or educator’s freedom to say the word “gay.”

It’s designed to limit organized instruction of sexual orientation or gender identity to young children.

Instead of framing the content of the bill accurately and reporting the important distinctions, the media has run with “Don’t Say Gay,” because it aligns with their ideological goals. (read more)

Sunday Talks, El Erian Predicts, Accurately, Inflation To Climb Beyond Ten Percent This Year

Mohamed El-Erian, the chief economic adviser for Allianz, got the inflation problem correct; states a forecast in line with CTH Main Street review, but then falls short on his political outlook for the solution.

Within the interview, El-Erian predicts inflation at the current CPI measure will increase from current 7.9% to over 10% this year.  That aspect is in alignment with CTH review at ground level.

Current real inflation is more than 15% across the board, if you use the CPI methodology we were using in the 70’s and 80’s.  Both the scale and the speed of the current price increases are historic.  That is why you are seeing prices on retail items jumping so high, so fast.  The price increases on highly consumable goods are in the 15 to 20% range.  WATCH

An increase to over 10%, using current CPI measures, equals an increase of 25 to 30% in actual price (using historic measures).  Keep in mind, we have already passed through a wave of backward-looking inflation in the 25 to 30% range.  El-Erian is predicting a duplication of that scale into the remainder of 2022, I agree.  The 2020 $3 item became the 2021 $4 item, which will now become the 2022 $5.50 item.  That is our reality. It will not get better.

Where we differ from El-Erian is on the wage side and the political analysis.  Any political intervention to create govt subsidy with the goal to generate a higher workforce will backfire – bigly.  Recent historic employment statistics have not yet reflected the demand side decline in goods.  The employment data is skewed and useless because of the COVID mitigation impact on jobs.

The employment picture is only just now starting to reflect the demand side drop.  Wages will not grow and will not provide fuel for inflation.  The currently hidden workforce reductions are generating downward pressure on wages naturally.  Adding subsidies (childcare etc), to generate a higher workforce into an environment with declining available jobs, will backfire.

Sector specific unions negotiating for higher wage contracts will find themselves trying to get wage increases while the top line of the organization is dropping due to lack of demand.   Unfortunately, the AFSCME is generally immune to this problem – government spending can always expand.

This is where El-Erian’s connection to Wall Street is his blind spot.  If what he suggests were carried out, govt will print money to cover even more deficit spending (the BBB agenda). That increased money supply will create even more inflation at the same time real life wage pressures are going down because the economy is contracting, and workers are getting laid-off.

The economy, quantified by the goods/services generated (minus imports), has been contracting since mid 2021.  The govt COVID subsidies created artificial and unnatural demand for goods.  If you take the massive COVID expenditures ($5+ trillion) out of the 2021 economy, the result is a recession that began mid 2021.

That bloated chicken, which carried the inflation created by the printing, is coming home to roost.  There ain’t no way in hell to avoid it.  The recession exists, regardless of our desire to ignore it or fill the hole with more QE printing.

The inflation problem is now magnified by the need for the Fed to raise interest rates and stop purchasing our own debt.  Raising interest rates will lower investment and naturally create fewer jobs.  The economy will contract further and faster.  El-Erian accurately notes there is no positive way out of this scenario, there are bad options and worse options.  The difference between them is how slow or fast we want to take off the bandaid.

$3 – $4 bread in 2020, became $4 – $5 bread in 2021, which will become $5.50 – $6.50 bread mid-summer 2022.  Other food store averages will follow a similar rate of price increase.  The processed food inflation is settling down, however, fresh foods inflation will now take over and has only just begun.  Fresh fruits and vegetables will increase in price at roughly twice the rate of processed goods.

Chemical product price increases should level off mid-summer; however, with unleaded gasoline still on target for $7/gal [diesel $8/$9 (range)] the packaging, transportation and distribution costs will continue putting upward pressure on finished good prices.

All of these things were going to happen this year, regardless of Russia and Ukraine.  The European conflict is now just a convenient excuse to avoid blame for outcomes of the underlying policies.

This economic reality is not exclusively a U.S. issue; however, the scale of the economic problem is exclusively a U.S. issue.  The globe may drop into a recession, but our hole will be far worse. (read more)

Alleged Florida drug dealer jailed after West Point cadets overdose on spring break

Florida cops have arrested an alleged drug dealer they say sold the fentanyl-laced cocaine to several West Point cadets who overdosed during a spring break trip this week.

Axel Giovany Casseus, 21, was jailed Saturday in lieu of $50,000 bail, Local10 News reported.

After identifying Casseus, an undercover police officer was successfully able to purchase 43 grams of cocaine from him for $1,000, according to an arrest report, the network reported.

While in custody, Casseus admitted to selling drugs to the West Point cadets and his phone contained correspondence with them, authorities said.

“Four cadets were taken to hospital. Of the six people involved, one person was not taken to hospital, and one was not a cadet. Five USMA cadets in total were involved. Two of the cadets remain hospitalized,” a West Point spokesman told The Post Saturday.

The school added the incident is “currently under investigation.” The students have not been identified, and it is unclear what disciplinary action they may face.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, has become a leading cause of drug death in the United States, where it flows freely into the country through the southern border via Chinese chemical labs. (read more)

“All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

— D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

A MISSIVE FROM AN ENEMY OF HUMANITY,
supported by grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal?

The U.S. is nearing 1 million [exaggerated] COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?

he United States reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?

Many countries have been pummeled by the coronavirus, but few have fared as poorly as the U.S. Its death rate surpassed that of any other large, wealthy nation—especially during the recent Omicron surge. The Biden administration placed all its bets on a vaccine-focused strategy, rather than the multilayered protections that many experts called for, even as America lagged behind other wealthy countries in vaccinating (and boosting) its citizens—especially elderly people, who are most vulnerable to the virus. In a study of 29 high-income countries, the U.S. experienced the largest decline in life expectancy in 2020 and, unlike much of Europe, did not bounce back in 2021. It was also the only country whose lowered life span was driven mainly by deaths among people under 60. Dying from COVID robbed each American of about a decade of life on average. As a whole, U.S. life expectancy fell by two years—the largest such decline in almost a century. Neither World War II nor any of the flu pandemics that followed it dented American longevity so badly.

Every American who died of COVID left an average of nine close relatives bereaved. Roughly 9 million people—3 percent of the population—now have a permanent hole in their world that was once filled by a parent, child, sibling, spouse, or grandparent. An estimated 149,000 children have lost a parent or caregiver. Many people were denied the familiar rituals of mourning—bedside goodbyes, in-person funerals. Others are grieving raw and recent losses, their grief trampled amid the stampede toward normal. “I’ve known multiple people who didn’t get to bury their parents or be with their families, and now are expected to go back to the grind of work,” says Steven Thrasher, a journalist and the author of The Viral Underclass, which looks at the interplay between inequalities and infectious diseases. “We’re not giving people the space individually or societally to mourn this huge thing that’s happened.”

After many of the biggest disasters in American memory, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, “it felt like the world stopped,” Lori Peek, a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disasters, told me. “On some level, we owned our failures, and there were real changes.” Crossing 1 million deaths could offer a similar opportunity to take stock, but “900,000 deaths felt like a big threshold to me, and we didn’t pause,” Peek said. Why is that? Why were so many publications and politicians focused on reopenings in January and February—the fourth- and fifth-deadliest months of the pandemic? Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months? If the U.S. faced half a year of daily hurricanes that each took 1,000 lives, it is hard to imagine that the nation would decide to, quite literally, throw caution to the wind. Why, then, is COVID different?

Many aspects of the pandemic work against a social reckoning. The threat—a virus—is invisible, and the damage it inflicts is hidden from public view. With no lapping floodwaters or smoking buildings, the tragedy becomes contestable to a degree that a natural disaster or terrorist attack cannot be. Meanwhile, many of those who witnessed COVID’s ruin are in no position to discuss it. Health-care workers are still reeling from “death on a scale I had never seen before,” as an intensive-care nurse told me last year. The bereaved face guilt on top of sadness: “I think about the way it would run through families and tight-knit groups and the huge psychological toll as people think, Am I the one who brought it in?” Whitney Robinson, a social epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. And though 3 percent of Americans have lost a close family member to COVID, that means 97 percent have not. The two years that were shaved off of the average life span undid two decades of progress in health, but in 2000, “it didn’t feel like we were living under a horrible mortality regime,” Andrew Noymer, a demographer at UC Irvine, told me. “It felt normal.”

To grapple with the aftermath of a disaster, there must first be an aftermath. But the coronavirus pandemic is still ongoing, and “feels so big that we can’t put our arms around it anymore,” Peek told me. Thinking about it is like staring into the sun, and after two years, it is no wonder people are looking away. As tragedy becomes routine, excess deaths feel less excessive. Levels of suffering that once felt like thunderclaps now resemble a metronome’s clicks—the background noise against which everyday life plays. The same inexorable inuring happened a century ago: In 1920, the U.S. was hit by a fourth wave of the great flu pandemic that had begun two years earlier, but even as people died in huge numbers, “virtually no city responded,” wrote John M. Barry, a historian of the 1918 flu. “People were weary of influenza, and so were public officials. Newspapers were filled with frightening news about the virus, but no one cared.”

Fatalism has also been stoked by failure. Two successive administrations floundered at controlling the virus, and both ultimately shunted the responsibility for doing so onto individuals. Vaccines brought hope, which was dashed as uptake stagnated, other protections were prematurely rolled back, and the Delta variant arrived. During that wave, parts of the South and Midwest experienced “a shocking level of death and transmission that was on par with the worst of that previous winter wave,” Robinson said, and even so the policy response was anemic at best. As Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University, told me in September 2020, if salvation never comes, “people are going to harden into a fatalistic sense that we have to accept whatever the risks are to continue with our everyday lives.”

America is accepting not only a threshold of death but also a gradient of death. Elderly people over the age of 75 are 140 times more likely to die than people in their 20s. Among vaccinated people, those who are immunocompromised account for a disproportionate share of severe illness and death. Unvaccinated people are 53 times more likely to die of COVID than vaccinated and boosted people; they’re also more likely to be uninsured, have lower incomes and less education, and face eviction risk and food insecurity. Working-class people were five times more likely to die from COVID than college graduates in 2020, and in California, essential workers continued dying at disproportionately high rates even after vaccines became widely available. Within every social class and educational tier, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people died at higher rates than white people. If all adults had died at the same rates as college-educated white people, 71 percent fewer people of color would have perished. People of color also died at younger ages: In its first year, COVID erased 14 years of progress in narrowing the life-expectancy gap between Black and white Americans. Because death fell inequitably, so did grief: Black children were twice as likely to have lost a parent to COVID than white ones, and Indigenous children, five times as likely. Older, sicker, poorer, Blacker or browner, the people killed by COVID were treated as marginally in death as they were in life. Accepting their losses comes easily to “a society that places a hierarchy on the value of human life, which is absolutely what America is built on,” Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist at the Michigan State University, told me.

These recent trends oozed from older ones. Well before COVID, nursing homes were understaffed, disabled people were neglected, and low-income people were disconnected from health care. The U.S. also had a chronically underfunded public-health system that struggled to slow the virus’s spread; packed and poorly managed “epidemic engines” such as prisons that allowed it to run rampant; an inefficient health-care system that tens of millions of Americans could not easily access and that was inundated by waves of sick patients; and a shredded social safety net that left millions of essential workers with little choice but to risk infection for income. Generations of racist policies widened the mortality gap between Black and white Americans to canyon size: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, calculated that white mortality during COVID was still substantially lower than Black mortality in the pre-pandemic years. In that light, the normalizing of COVID deaths is unsurprising. “When deaths happen to people who are already not valued in a million other ways, it’s easier to not value their lives in this additional way,” Wrigley-Field told me.

While epidemics flow downward into society’s cracks, medical interventions rise upward into its peaks. New cures, vaccines, and diagnostics first go to people with power, wealth, education, and connections, who then move on; this explains why health inequities so stubbornly persist across the decades even as health problems change. AIDS activism, for example, lost steam and resources once richer, white Americans had access to effective antiretroviral drugs, Steven Thrasher told me, leaving poorer Black communities with high rates of infection. “It’s always a real danger that things get worse once the people with the most political clout are okay,” Thrasher said. Similarly, pundits who got vaccinated against COVID quickly started arguing against overcaution and (inaccurately) predicting the pandemic’s imminent end. The government did too, framing the crisis as solely a matter of personal choice, even as it failed to make rapid tests, high-quality masks, antibody cocktails, and vaccines accessible to the poorest groups. The CDC’s latest guidelines continue that trend, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has argued. Globally, the richer north is moving on while the poorer south is still vulnerable and significantly unvaccinated. All of this “shifts the burden to the very groups experiencing mass deaths to protect themselves, while absolving leaders from creating the conditions that would make those groups safe,” Courtney Boen, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s a lot easier to say that we have to learn to live with COVID if you’re not personally experiencing the ongoing loss of your family members.”

Richard Keller, a medical historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says that much of the current pandemic rhetoric—the premature talk of endemicity; the focus on comorbidities; the from-COVID-or-with-COVID debate—treats COVID deaths as dismissible and “so inevitable as to not merit precaution,” he has written. “Like gun violence, overdose, extreme heat death, heart disease, and smoking, [COVID] becomes increasingly associated with behavioral choice and individual responsibility, and therefore increasingly invisible.” We don’t honor deaths that we ascribe to individual failings, which could explain, Keller argues, why national moments of mourning have been scarce. There have been few pandemic memorials, save some moving but temporary art projects. Resolutions to turn the first Monday of March into a COVID-19 Victims and Survivors Memorial Day have stalled in the House and Senate. Instead, the U.S. is engaged in what Keller calls “an active process of forgetting.” If safety is now a matter of personal responsibility, then so is remembrance.

No one knows how many people will die from COVID in the coming years. The number will depend on our collective behavior, how many more people can be vaccinated or boosted, the length and strength of immunity, what new variants arise, and more. Andrew Noymer, the demographer, thinks that COVID will kill fewer people per year than it has in the past two, but will probably still be more lethal than the flu, which sets a plausible and very wide range of somewhere between 50,000 and 500,000 annual deaths. (COVID will also continue to cause long-term disability.)

How much of this extra mortality will the U.S. accept? The CDC’s new guidelines provide a clue. They recommend that protective measures such as indoor masking kick in once communities pass certain thresholds of cases and hospitalizations. But the health-policy experts Joshua Salomon and Alyssa Bilinski calculated that by the time communities hit the CDC’s thresholds, they’d be on the path to at least three daily deaths per million, which equates to 1,000 deaths per day nationally. And crucially, the warning lights would go off too late to prevent those deaths. “As a level of mortality the White House and CDC are willing to accept before calling for more public health protection, this is heartbreaking,” Salomon said on Twitter.

Read: The millions of people stuck in pandemic limbo

If 1,000 deaths a day is not acceptable, what threshold would be? The extreme answer—none!—is impractical, because COVID has long passed the point where eradication is possible, and because all interventions carry at least some cost. Some have suggested that we should look to other causes of death—say, 39,000 car fatalities a year, or between 12,000 and 52,000 flu deaths—as a baseline of what society is prepared to tolerate. But this argument rests on the false assumption that our acceptance of those deaths is informed. Most of us simply don’t know how many people die of various causes—or that it’s possible for fewer to do so. The measures that protected people from COVID slashed adult deaths from flu and all but eliminated them among children. Our acceptance of those deaths never accounted for alternatives. “When was I offered the choice between having a society where you’re expected to go into work when you’re ill or having fewer people die of the flu every year?” Wrigley-Field, the sociologist, said to me.

Even when the potential benefits are clear, there’s no universal algorithm that balances the societal disruption of a policy against the number of lives saved. Instead, our attitudes about preventing death revolve around how possible it seems and how much we care. About 40,000 Americans are killed by guns every year, but instead of preventing these deaths, “we have organized ourselves around the inevitability of gun violence,” Sonali Rajan of Columbia University’s Teachers College said on Twitter.

Doing the same for COVID, as Rajan says is now happening, means prematurely capitulating to the pathogens that come next. The inequities that were overlooked in this pandemic will ignite the next one—but they don’t have to. Improving ventilation in workplaces, schools, and other public buildings would prevent deaths from COVID and other airborne viruses, including flu. Paid sick leave would allow workers to protect their colleagues without risking their livelihood. Equitable access to antivirals and other treatments could help immunocompromised people who can’t be protected through vaccination. Universal health care would help the poorest people, who still bear the greatest risk of infection. A universe of options lies between the caricatured extremes of lockdowns and inaction, and will save lives when new variants or viruses inevitably arise.

Such changes are popular. Stephan Lewandowsky, from the University of Bristol, presented a representative sample of Americans with two possible post-COVID futures—a “back to normal” option that emphasized economic recovery, and a “build back better” option that sought to reduce inequalities. He found that most people preferred the more progressive future—but wrongly assumed that most other people preferred a return to normal. As such, they also deemed that future more likely. This phenomenon, where people think widespread views are minority ones and vice versa, is called pluralistic ignorance. It often occurs because of active distortion by politicians and the press, Lewandowsky told me. (For example, a poll that found that mask mandates are favored by 50 percent of Americans and opposed by just 28 percent was nonetheless framed in terms of waning support.) “This is problematic because over time, people tend to adjust their opinions in the direction of what they perceive as the majority,” Lewandowsky told me. By wrongly assuming that everyone else wants to return to the previous status quo, we foreclose the possibility of creating something better.

There is still time. Steven Thrasher, the journalist, noted that a new wave of AIDS memorials is only now starting to show up, long after the start of that pandemic. COVID will similarly persist, as will the chance to reckon with its cost, and the opportunity to steel our society against similar threats. Right now, the U.S. is barreling toward the next pandemic, having failed to learn the lessons of the past two years, let alone the past century. But Wrigley-Field, the sociologist, told me that she draws inspiration from the big social movements of the past, where gains in equality that seemed impossible at first were eventually achieved. “We’re really bad judges of what is possible based on what we’re experiencing in a particular moment,” she said. “Nothing major that has mattered for health came quickly or easily.” (read more)

Some Blacks Were Involved

Police arrest one suspect in connection to fentanyl-laced cocaine overdose that hospitalized six West Point cadets on spring break in Florida: Three remain hospitalized with two on ventilators in critical condition while one is stable

• Wilton Manors police have arrested a suspect in connection to the group of spring breakers who overdosed on cocaine laced with fentanyl Thursday night
• Six West Point Academy cadets, at least two of whom were football players, vacationing in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during spring break were hospitalized after overdosing on fentanyl-laced cocaine 
• Police say four of the cadets took the drug and went into cardiac arrest, and the other two became exposed to it while performing mouth-to-mouth on their friends 
• A seventh individual was later taken to the hospital and treated, however it is unclear if she also overdosed
• Paramedics who responded to the scene at a vacation home used opioid-overdose-reversing drug naloxone - also known as Narcan - on the patients
• As of Friday, only three remained hospitalized with two on ventilators in critical condition while one is stable
• West Point representative said in a statement the military college was aware of the incident and investigating  
• Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic painkiller that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine
  

A suspect believed to be connected to the group of spring breakers who overdosed on cocaine laced with fentanyl was arrested in Florida, police confirmed to WSVN Friday night. 

Police in Wilton Manors, a city located in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area, did not release the suspect's name or indicate their connection to the six West Point cadets who were hospitalized Thursday after overdosing on the drug. At least two of the students were football players at the military academy, located in New York. 

A seventh individual, only identified as a woman, was later taken to the hospital and treated, the Sun-Sentinel reported. It is unclear if she suffered an overdose or what condition she is in. It is also unknown if she attended West Point with the other patients.

As of late Friday, only three remained in the hospital, the TV station reported. Two were in critical condition and on ventilators. The other patient is said to be in stable condition.  

Two of the cadets had not ingested the drugs but were overcome by the effects of fentanyl when they attempted to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on their sickened friends, the Sun-Sentinel first reported on Friday. It is unknown where or how they obtained the drugs.

The students were staying in a short-term vacation rental home listed on VRBO for $360 per night. The 1,596-square-foot home features three bedrooms and two bathrooms, as well as a large backyard with a private pool, according to the listing, and is a 15-minute walk to the beach.  

The home was vacated of the renters by Friday evening, according to reports. It remains unclear if the suspect was staying at the rental property with the spring breakers.  

DailyMail.com reached to the U.S. Army Academy at West Point and was told by a representative that the prestigious military college was 'aware' of the incident in Florida involving its students. 

'The U.S. Military Academy is aware of the situation involving West Point cadets, which occurred Thursday night in Wilton Manors, FL,' a West Point spokesperson said in an email. 'The incident is currently under investigation and no other details are available at this time.' 

News helicopter video shows paramedics converging on the front yard of the short-term vacation rental home on NW 29th Court in Wilton Manors, where multiple people were found in cardiac arrest at 5 p.m. Thursday.

Footage from the scene shows first responders administering first aid and placing several individuals onto stretchers. 

Fort Lauderdale Fire Department Battalion Chief Steve Gollan told Local10 that two of the people who overdosed were sickened because they tried to perform CPR on the initial four overdose victims. He said the opioid-overdose-reversing drug naloxone, which is sold under the brand name Narcan, was administered to revive the victims. 

Neighbors described seeing the spring breakers being carried out of the rental home crowded with young vacationers. 

'We saw paramedics pulling the kids out of the house, unconscious, just laying them on the grass,' Dana Fumosa, who lives a few doors down, told NBC6.  

Neighborhood resident Cub Larkin, who also witnessed paramedics rescuing the students, said: 'We view our military at a much higher standard, and it was just completely heartbreaking.' 

Four of the patients were taken to Broward Health Medical Center, and the remaining two were transported to Holy Cross Hospital. 

'These are healthy young adults, college students in the prime of their life,' Gollan said. 'Getting this drug into their system, it’s unknown what the recovery will be on the critical individual.'

Fentanyl is an unpredictable and powerful synthetic painkiller blamed for driving an increase in fatal drug overdoses. It's 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine and used to treat severe pain, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says. It also slows a person’s breathing and heart rate. 

Neighbors in Wilton Manors told the Sun-Sentinel that the West Point cadets had been staying at the rental property for several days, and that on Wednesday night police were called for an unspecified reason. 

Two local residents said they have repeatedly complained to the managers of the vacation property about excessive noise and rowdy parties.  

'We’ve been hearing over the last couple of days, loud music, gatherings,' Fumosa told WSVN. 'It was guys and girls over there. They seemed to be having a good time barbecuing, and they were in the pool.' It is unclear if she complained about the travelers. 

(read more)

In Deepest, Darkest Ohio

No charges brought against Columbus Police officer in fatal shooting of Ma'Khia Bryant

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX) — A Columbus Police officer who shot and killed 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant in April 2021, will not be charged.

The Fraternal Order of Police said a grand jury declined to bring charges against Officer Nicholas Reardon.

"The jury decided to return a no bill which means they did not proceed with any criminal charges against officer Reardon and found no criminal act," FOP President Jeff Simpson said. "That is pleasing to hear. It’s always sad when there is a loss of life, however, the actions of the people at scene, caused him to take action that saved lives and he is trained very well. He did his job, and it is a good outcome."

Michelle Martin, an attorney for the family of Ma'Khia Bryant, provided the following statement to ABC 6:

"Ma'Khia Bryant's family is disappointed that a Franklin County grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot and killed her last year. Ma'Khia's family has long wondered why this officer opted for lethal force even though there should have been other non-deadly options available to deal with this situation. We believe that the tragedy that ultimately resulted in Ma'Khia's death started long before she was shot and killed by a Columbus police officer. There must be full-scale changes made to Ohio's foster care system to ensure that this doesn't happen to another child. We need to work tirelessly to protect those who are most vulnerable in our society. Ohio's foster care system is failing our children and we cannot stand by and allow this to continue. As the one-year anniversary of Ma'Khia's death approaches, her family is resolute in their fight for justice on her behalf." (read more)

HOMO HATE HOAXER JAILED (finally)

The Ministry of Public Information Announces Internet Search Modifications to Protect Citizens Against Wrong Thoughts

In the olden days this would be akin to picking up a redacted Yellow Pages phone directory.

Comrades, the Ministry of Public Information, DuckDuckGo Division, is making modifications to the internet search engine results in order to protect us from dis-information, mis-information and mal-information.  Wrongthinking perspectives will no longer be acceptable.


The Ministry of Peace appreciates you not questioning our collective responsibility for war. (read more)

MM observations and thoughts about the war in the Ukraine – Part 2

Any nation that does not manufacture things, or have resources to exploit, cannot be a nation for long.

Here we continue on thoughts about the war in the Ukraine and the resulting Geo-Political realignments.

What is so significant about this time is that the massive build-up to the final death of America and the rise of Asia has begun.

This is part 2. Part one is HERE.

The first part went out, and I was deluged by a bunch of gung-ho ‘Merica types accusing me of all sorts of things. Sheech! My thoughts are what is going on between Russia and the Ukraine / USA / NATO is very simple;

Obey the agreements that you signed.
If you don't, you risk war.

It’s not just me who believe this.

It’s EVERY FUCKING NATION on the planet except for the USA, UK, Australia, and NATO believes it.

And you cannot talk your way out of it, not matter how solidly you control the narrative. Your narrative is restricted to a very small “echo chamber” centered in the United States.

It is meaningless outside of it.

Ah.

Sigh. The sheeple have been vault 7 programmed to NPC status. Angry; very, VERY angry. Mindless. Devoid of the ability to understand fundamentals. Sigh.

[...]

[1] Ukraine / Russia conflict is a different kind of war


The United States set up a puppet government in Ukraine with the CIA / NGO “color revolution” of 2014. They gained support from nationalists who adopted a fierce neo-Nazi stance, and who even reactivated the Asov SS Division. The official AZOV emblem is the ‘Wolfsangel‘.

During World War II, various units of the German Nazi army used this symbol, including the SS Panzer Division.

The USA then funded the Ukraine president lavishly with nearly 2 billion dollars in off-shore accounts. He, in return for that enormous wealth, allowed the USA to dictate his actions. NATO was set up operationally, and in every manner, bioweapons facilities and nuclear launch sites were all set in motion.

Ukraine became the fourth largest recipient of American military weapons and equipment. Russia found this unacceptable.

And, as such, demanded the expansion of NATO stop, and the removal of nuclear systems for its borders. Russia, after the resounding “no” from both NATO and the United States carried out it’s ultimatum.

Right now, what we are witnessing is a total gutting of the United States puppet government and neo-Nazi elements, and a return to Ukraine independence and sovereignty.

This differs from an invasion. Where one nation invades another to seize it’s cities, land, people and resources.

[2] Incorrigible Criminal Elements


You may disagree with their decision process, and operational orders, but you have to face reality. You must accept things as they are, not as you want them to be.

[3] NATO Planned to Launch a “first strike” Against Russia

The movement of nuclear forces on the Russian border was intended to zero out the advantage of Russia’s hyper-velocity nuclear arment. That’s what this entire conflict is all about.

And Russia said NO!


[4] Offensive Nuclear Warfare So… why piss around using conventional warfare in Ukraine?


[5] Defensive Nuclear Warfare So what? The United States Military Empire is the largest in history, and armed with massive impressive weapons. There should be nothing to be afraid of.

Right?


[6] Bioweapons What about other forms of weapons? Such as bioweapons…


This discovery of a laptop “smoking gun”, coupled by the likely shipment of Turkish drones modified for the delivery of toxic aerosols or other bio-toxins (identical to those that spread the swine flu to devistate the Chinese pork industy in 2017)  immediately prior to the launch of the Special Operation serves to explain the RF attack.

The modified drones are unconfirmed as of yet, but two Turkish Airbus freighters were tracked landing in Ukraine immediately prior to the attack.

The laptop is physical evidence of a close association between NATO and the Nazis. This association pre-dates the Special Operation and indicates NATO complicity in an attack on both Donbass and Crimea. Ref HERE.

[7] Russia is not isolated and alone


[...]
[10] The United States is NOT READY for a defeat


[11] The anti-Russia narrative of “a big Russian mistake” will end


[12] The United States is running Ukraine


[...]
[14] Putin’s popularity is not collapsing


[...]
[17] Nazi hardliners in Ukraine


[18] Why defend the United States?

My personal opinions. But sheech! people. When you live in a place where the streets are clean, radicals of every kind (SJW, BLM, and KKK) are put in mental hospitals, the people are happy, and parks are everywhere… the USA really, REALLY looks like a steaming pile of dog shit.


[...]
[24] Gas to Europe has been cut


[25] American and European PSYOPS have fled Russia


[26] This is a REAL war


[27] Outside of the United States and NATO, billions of people root for Russia


[28] Consequences of Sanctioning Russia


[29] Numerous “War Hawk” American neocons want direct military conflict with Russia


[30] Fertilizer catastrophie


(read more)

One glorious day in Sevastopol 12 years ago, I saw what was coming. That's why I won't join this carnival of hypocrisy

In the long-ago summer of 2010, I found myself in the beautiful harbour of Sevastopol, surveying the rival fleets of Russia and Ukraine as they rode at anchor in the lovely Crimean sunshine.

One great fortress was adorned with banners proclaiming 'Glory to the Ukrainian Navy!' Another frowning bastion across the water bore the words 'Glory to the Russian Navy!'

In the streets of that elegant city, with its porticoes and statues and monuments to repeated wars, sailors from the two fleets mingled on the pavements.

The Russians looked like Russians, with their huge hats and Edwardian uniforms. The Ukrainians looked more like the US Navy on shore leave in San Diego.

It was almost funny to see. I hoped at that time that it would work out well. For the Ukrainians had begun to be silly.

In a country crammed with Russians, they were trying to make Russian a second-class language.

Russians who had lived there happily for decades were pressured to take Ukrainian citizenship and adopt Ukrainian versions of their Christian names.

The schools were promoting a national hero, Stepan Bandera, who Russians strongly disliked and regarded as a terrorist.

And they were teaching history which often had an anti-Russian tinge. Quite a few people told me they felt put upon by these policies. Why couldn't they just be left alone?

Until that point, Ukraine had been a reasonably harmonious country in its 20-odd years of existence. After that visit I saw big trouble coming, both in the Crimea and in the Don Basin, where I also travelled that year.

Far out among the abandoned slagheaps of the dying coalfields, I found the decaying semi-deserted town of Gorlovka, now in the midst of an unofficial war-zone, where it has been since 2014.

This town had been officially renamed Horlivka by Ukraine in its high-handed way, though hardly anybody I met there called it that. Gorlovka in those days still hosted the rather pleasant Cafe Barnsley, the last echo of the Soviet days when Gorlovka had been twinned with Barnsley in a gesture of Communist solidarity with Arthur Scargill's miners.

I remember, that boiling hot, almost silent afternoon, enjoying a Russian beer there, while listening to music from a Russian station on the radio. I wrote rather vaguely at the time that the people of Crimea and Donbas were hoping for – and expecting – a Russian future.

I thought that if Ukraine wanted to be a rigid ethnic nationalist state, then some sort of peaceful deal with its Russian minority was going to be needed. Little did I know what passions I had touched on.

I was amazed to find that I had done something wicked and subversive. The article was attacked as a 'dismaying lapse' by my old friend Edward Lucas, a fine journalist with whom I had spent happy times reporting the collapse of the Soviet Empire, way back in the 1980s.

I especially recall a joyous celebratory dinner with him and others in the decayed 1950s splendours of the Jalta Hotel on Wenceslas Square in Prague, on the freezing night when the Communist regime finally died there.

I replied to his rebuke by warning that 'the conventional wisdom is mistaken, that the open-mouthed sycophantic coverage of such events as the 'Orange Revolution' has done us no favours, and that the future in this part of the world is far from settled and we should perhaps prepare for further turmoil rather than imagine that we have opened a Golden Road of peace and prosperity for ever'.

I asked: 'Are the Anglosphere nations right to treat Russia as a perpetual threat and pariah long after its global ambitions have collapsed and its military power has rusted away? Its regime is miserable. But then so is that of China, with which we seek good relations.'

You see, I have been making this point for a very long time. But it never seems to do any good. In fact, I am accused of being a 'Russian shill' or even a traitor, of parroting Russian propaganda, or things of that kind.

These insults make little impact on me personally because I know they are not true and I have, over the past 30 years been insulted by experts of all kinds. It is normal, if you do what I do.

But such behaviour makes it harder for the country to keep a level head. In the atmosphere of the last few days, I half-expect to be presented with a white feather on the street by a beautiful young woman, because I refuse to join in the war hysteria now gripping the country. And it is hysteria.

I have heard a respected MP calling for the deportation of all Russians from this country – all of them. I have heard crazy people calling for a 'no-fly zone' in Ukraine.

If they got their way it would mean a terrible and immediate European war. I suspect they do not even know what they are calling for. Can you all please call off this carnival of hypocrisy?

I cannot join in it. I know too much. I know that our policy of NATO expansion – which we had promised not to do and which we knew infuriated Russians – played its part in bringing about this crisis.

I know that Ukraine's current government, now treated as if it was almost holy, was brought into being by a mob putsch openly backed by the USA in 2014.

I know that the much-admired President Zelensky in February 2021 closed down three opposition TV stations on the grounds of 'national security'. They went dark that night. I know that the opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk was put under house arrest last year on a charge of treason. Isn't this the sort of thing Putin does?

I know that Ukraine's army has used severe force against Russian civilians in the Don Basin since 2014. The Russians have done dreadful things there, too, but there are plenty of people who will tell you that. The point is that this is not a contest of saints versus sinners, or of Mordor versus the Shire.

I also find it awkward that, when Britain and the USA rightly denounced Putin's illegal invasion of a sovereign country, they seemed to have forgotten that we gave him the idea, by doing this in Iraq in 2003. Unlike them I can truly claim to have opposed both these actions.

I tire of being told that NATO is purely defensive alliance when we know it bombed Serbia in 1999, incidentally killing civilians, when Serbia had not attacked a NATO member.

I also don't recall Libya attacking a NATO member before that 'defensive' alliance launched the air war on Tripoli which also killed civilians, children included, and turned that country into a cauldron of chaos, benefiting nobody.

And then there's the other thing that sticks in my gullet. The countries of the West have egged Ukraine on into a confrontation with Russia which has predictably ended in Putin's barbaric invasion.

But while we stand and cheer at a safe distance, the Ukrainians are the ones who get shelled, bombed, besieged and driven from their homes. Is this honourable? Does sentimental praise for their bravery make up for it?

I would like to end with two quotations. The first is from the American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman who said: 'I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.'

The other is from the 'Benedictus' in the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which asks God 'to give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace', which I fervently pray, for I am not sure that anything else will now do any good. (read more)

Joe Biden Doesn’t Want Your Gas To Be $4 A Gallon. He Wants It To Cost Even More

You paying more (and more) at the pump just means Biden gets one step closer to his anti-oil agenda. Don’t think he isn’t happy about it.

as prices in the United States hit a new all-time high under President Joe Biden’s watch on Tuesday, clocking in at an average of $4.17 per gallon, surpassing the previous record of $4.11 set in 2008.

A friend told me he recently saw prices jump 50 cents from the time he drove to work to the time he drove home. A gas station in Florida I stopped at last month had two “I did that” stickers on it. After someone had apparently tried to rip them off, someone else took a blue ballpoint pen and scrawled “FJB” on the front of the gas pump. Similar stickers have popped up in growing numbers all around the country.

It’s obvious to everyone paying attention (except for Biden and his corporate media comms shop… but that’s redundant) that the Democrat administration’s policies, not just the Russians, are to blame for rising prices at the pump. The third week of February, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine started, the average price of U.S. gas was $3.53 per gallon, compared with $2.38 the week Biden took office: a $1.15 difference. (That fact hasn’t stopped Press Secretary Jen Psaki from lying through her teeth to blame the spike entirely on Russia.)

But, bumbling though they are, the Biden administration did not just achieve rising gas prices through accidents and incompetence. Your pain at the pump isn’t just unforeseen collateral damage of the White House’s policies — it’s a very intentional result of it.

That’s right: Biden wants staggering gas prices to force you from being able to drive where you want, when you want, as much as you want to. It’s all a part of his green energy agenda, which panders to radicals on the far-left side of Biden’s ever-further-left party.

A video from Americans for Tax Reform shows Biden at a campaign rally pledging, “We are gonna get rid of fossil fuels.” Asked “would there be any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in a Biden administration?” by CNN’s Dana Bash during one of the Democratic primary debates in 2019, Biden responded “No.”

“We would — we would work it out,” he continued. “We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those, either — any fossil fuel.” Eliminated.

In the same debate and at many other moments, Biden has made clear his desire for the United States to erase gas-driven cars for electric vehicles. “My plan calls for 500,000 charging stations around the country so by 2030 we’re all electric vehicles,” he said at the time (a plan he’s unlikely to reach in the next eight years). If they want to get rid of your car, don’t think they wouldn’t start by trying to squeeze your gas tank dry.

When Biden’s damage control team has tried to soften his anti-oil remarks, even leftists can see through it. “Of course Biden meant what he said about fossil fuels. There is a price to fighting climate change,” headlined an op-ed in the Washington Post in October 2020.

His actions have backed that agenda up, too, from canceling the Keystone XL pipeline to suspending new drillings on federal lands to moving us away from the energy independence the U.S. established under former president Trump. That agenda has been apparent even in the Biden administration’s tone-deaf responses to the current spike in gas prices.

Psaki’s No. 1 takeaway from the gas crisis is to remind everyday Americans that it’s a good time for “reducing our dependence on fossil fuels,” as if rising prices play directly into the gleeful administration’s hands.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has failed in every sector she’s been appointed to take charge of, spent Monday afternoon with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promoting the administration’s anti-gas messaging and suggesting that perhaps Americans should just eat cake buy electric cars.

The average cost of an electric vehicle is $56,437, “equivalent to an entry-level luxury car.” But the financial reality that most Americans don’t have 50 grand to drop on a Tesla didn’t stop Harris from fantasizing about a world in which all of your gas-guzzling trucks, minivans, and school buses are in the junkyard.

“Imagine a future: the freight trucks that deliver bread and milk to our grocery store shelves and the buses that take children to school and parents to work. Imagine all the heavy-duty vehicles that keep our supply lines strong and allow our economy to grow. Imagine that they produce zero emissions,” she said.

“We have the ability to see what can be unburdened by what has been and then to make the possible actually happen,” she continued, in her trademark word salad.

Even in the face of rising gas prices back in November, Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm admitted that in her perspective, the United States was “working through an energy transition” from oil and gas.

You paying more (and more, and more) at the pump just means Biden gets one step closer to his anti-oil agenda. Don’t think he isn’t happy about it. (read more)

The Media’s Insidious Effort to Shift Economic Blame From White House to Russia Continues

The propaganda effort by western media, specifically but not exclusively U.S. media, to shift blame for massive economic damage from Joe Biden to Russia is reaching a stunning level of coordinated intent.

The cognitive dissonance (fancy words for telling lies under the cloud of economic analysis) is not only happening in the U.S; a similar level of blame-shifting is happening in Europe, Australia, Canada and most western media outlets.

The global economic contraction, which was specifically and intentionally created by the collective ‘Build Back Better‘ promoters, is now being blamed on Russia; and, quite frankly, the motive behind the corporate media shifting the blame is because the underlying ideology (western policy) was/is supported by the leftist media tribe.

Throughout 2021, it is well documented how government COVID policies of lockdowns, economic consequences and insane spending, created the baseline problem behind inflation.  Simultaneously, the western approach toward energy development and the “opportunity” the EU and U.S. sought to exploit within the BBB agenda to radically transform energy use, was simply pouring super-volatile fuel on an already burning fire.

In 2021, gasoline prices increased 60 to 80 percent.  Food prices jumped 15 to 40 percent, with some sectors even higher.  By the time the EU central bankers and U.S. Federal reserve finally admitted inflation was no longer “transitory,” we were facing next harvest fertilizer prices that tripled in price from 2020, and oil prices that had doubled in the span of 12 months.

None of this had anything whatsoever to do with Russia’s plans for Ukraine.   Every part of the economic problem was created by government policy.

The western working class are in an abusive relationship with western government.

Reckless spending during an intentionally blocked economy, combined with radically changed energy and monetary policy, created this storm of economic consequence.  At no point in this scenario was the outcome not in the control of government.

These consequences were specifically caused by ideological decisions made by people who are never affected by them.  However, in a sick, twisted and Machiavellian effort to avoid the pitchforks now heading in their direction, these government leaders and their media stenographers are trying desperately to pin the blame on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This example from Axios today is a case study in blame shifting:

Economic forecasters are starting to plug the effects of the Ukraine war into their models. It doesn’t look good, especially for Europe.

Why it matters: Much of the world is set to experience weaker growth and higher inflation than seemed likely mere weeks ago. And that’s assuming some of the more dire possibilities that further escalation of the conflict could bring don’t materialize.

The big picture: Soaring energy prices are the most direct channel through which the world economy stands to be battered by the conflict. But rising prices for other commodities will also fuel inflation and could disrupt supply lines.

• • These forecasts were made last week before a new surge in oil futures overnight Sunday into Monday that will only intensify these pressures.
  • Moreover, geopolitical risk has tightened financial conditions, which could constrain investment — though that effect is modest so far.

By the numbers: Economists at JPMorgan said Friday they expect the world economy to grow 0.8 percentage points slower in 2022 than they did on Feb. 18. (read more)

Everything is obtuse crap.

However, in our discussions we do not need to pretend.  Preparations require a brutal acceptance of the landscape that is in front of us, not some clouded avoidance that will only make us victims to our lack of acceptance.

In May and June of 2021, the entire economic machine shifted.  That was when the final cash dump into the economy became visible. Everything since then is a direct outcome of that inflection point.  It has been eight months of economic smoke and mirrors.

Inflation in the last half of 2021 was driven by spending decisions in the first half of 2021.   That oil in the machinery has dried up.  As we watched the reserve tanks emptying, CTH was warning -repeatedly- to prepare.  Now, things are about to seize.  We will see even more inflation as massive increases in fuel will drive up the costs of everything again.

It’s not an issue of whether a recession is possible, likely or probable.  As we noted last year, the recession would have naturally taken place in the third and fourth quarter. It was clear that overall consumer demand was artificially propped up by govt subsidy.  Government intervention stopped the natural demand contraction from surfacing.

Now, with even higher oil prices leading to $7/gal gasoline, there will be no way to avoid seeing the pain of an economic recession under much steeper terms than before.    None of this is accidental.  All of this is by design.

Massive increases in energy and gasoline costs are a feature of their plan, not a flaw.

Joe Biden always was the disposable political tool within this insidious scheme. (read more)

Biden Announces Total Ban on Russian Energy Imports, Tells Peasants to Deal with Gas Prices

NOW – Biden bans all imports of Russian oil and gas into the US. pic.twitter.com/Oe29Ecd4Jc

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) March 8, 2022

Welp.

Joe Biden has officially done the deed: he’s announced a full ban on Russian oil and gas imports.

He says you’re just going to have to deal with the price hikes on gasoline.

BIDEN: "The decision today is not without cost here at home. Putin's war is already hurting American families at the gas pump" pic.twitter.com/nJCOYPUkV0

— Insider Paper (@TheInsiderPaper) March 8, 2022

He says it’s not his fault, don’t ever blame him again. He is doing a great job at everything.

Biden takes down the Fox News/GOP claim that his policies are causing rising gas prices, " simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production. That's simply not true." pic.twitter.com/NbA1dhVGdY

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 8, 2022

He also said that this is some kind of Great Reset global warming thing and you have to buy an electric car.

Biden argues the high gas prices are the perfect opportunity to force people to buy electric cars: "It will make America a leader to exporting clean energy to countries all around the world. This is the goal we should be racing towards." pic.twitter.com/NmFk0o2uUf

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 8, 2022

(No one seems to be aware of how these electric cars are made and maintained, or where the electricity that fuels them comes from.)

He didn’t mention the obvious fact that this means literally everything is going to nearly double in price, and basically, you’re all poor forever.

Who was requesting this, other than the government and media?

Well, the answer is: people who are not affected by gas prices. That’s the only people who could be requesting it.

JUST IN – Average gas prices in the U.S. reached $4.17 per gallon today, the highest in history, breaking the previous record of $4.11 set in July 2008. pic.twitter.com/rRvpbGBfT1

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) March 8, 2022

Not even women are stupid enough to say “make me so poor I can’t live my life because of this atrocity gibberish I saw on TV about a country I’d never heard of until last week.”

I guess one underlying point of interest is that Brandon himself is obviously going to get blamed for this, which means that Democrats are going to lose the midterm elections badly even with whatever election-rigging they had planned.

Then, you’ll have both houses controlled by the Republicans who are – surprise, goyim! Surprise! – way more aggressively anti-Russian (and anti-Chinese) than even the Democrats. (read more)