Steve Bull's Blog, page 133
January 29, 2023
The West Must Never Again Go Totalitarian
The West Must Never Again Go TotalitarianThe West can never again go totalitarian.
We saw it happen generations ago. We fought two of humanity’s most destructive wars and faced the horror of industrial-scale extermination. Never again, said the world’s peoples in the late 1940s, and they began the difficult task of uncovering all that had been done, all that had gone wrong.
The mass graves, the German and Soviet labor camps, the Japanese massacres in the Far East, America’s internment camps, the secret police and the mutilations, the ever-present threat of violence hanging over every member of society. We saw the personality cults around Hitler or Stalin for what they were, the blatant ideologies for what they had resulted in.
When the Berlin Wall fell in November of 1989, and with it the remains of the Evil Empire that had put it there, we discovered more horror. The archives of East Germany and the Kremlin showed that informants were everywhere happily giving up information – real or invented – on their fellow humans. We found more bodies. We learned that under enough fear and pressure, human life wasn’t worth anything. When push came to violent shove, bonds of family and community meant nothing.
The error of this terrifying history is to think that this was a problem of “the other,” someone far away who is nothing like us. Asks Thorsteinn Siglaugsson in a recent article: ”How do you find your inner Nazi? And how do you get him under control? Most people would have participated in the atrocities of their time, had they been put in that position – or at least sat by and allowed them to happen.”
In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s oft used and highly relevant phrase says that the line between good and evil passes “right through every human heart.”…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Are You the Collateral Damage of Central Planners?
The Conference Board – a nonprofit think tank that delivers cutting edge research – recently published its latest Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States. The findings were a giant bummer. In December, the LEI dropped for the tenth consecutive month.
The LEI, if you’re unfamiliar with it, consolidates various measures of economic activity, including credit, interest rate spreads, consumer expectations, building permits, new orders of goods and materials, and several other items, to assess which way the economic winds are blowing. Over the past six months, the LEI has fallen by 4.2 percent. This is the fastest six-month decline since the great coronavirus panic.
This week, the Bureau of Economic Analysis provided its advance estimate of Q4 U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). For the final quarter of 2022, real GDP increased at an annual rate of 2.9 percent.
How could it be that GDP is expanding while the LEI is contracting?
The most probable answer we can think of is the massive expansion of consumer debt. For example, credit card balances hit a new record of $866 billion during Q3 2022. That marks a year-over-year increase of 19 percent.
Americans are borrowing from their future to make ends meet today. This may give GDP the appearance that it’s expanding. But, in reality, the GDP expansion is merely a measurement of the rate that consumers are going broke.
The fact is the U.S. economy is traversing headlong into a recession at the worst possible time. We expect things will get especially ugly, as consumers are operating in a world of chaos…
World of Chaos
In a centrally planned economy, decisions are not made between individuals through free market mechanisms. Instead, they’re made by politicians and bureaucrats through policies of mass market intervention.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
January 28, 2023
Sunshine Might Be Free But Solar Power is Not Cheap
Mississippi residents are consistently told that renewable energy sources, like solar panels, are now the lowest-cost ways to generate electricity, but these claims are based on creative accounting gimmicks that only examine a small portion of the expenses incurred to integrate solar onto the grid while excluding many others.
When these hidden expenses are accounted for, it becomes obvious that solar is much more expensive than Mississippi’s existing coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants and that adding more solar will increase electricity prices for the families and businesses that rely upon it. One of the most common ways of estimating the cost of generating electricity from different types of power plants is a metric called the Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE.
The LCOE is an estimate of the long-term average cost of producing electricity from a power plant. These values are estimated by taking the costs of the plant, such as the money needed to build and operate it, fuel costs, and the cost to borrow money, and dividing them by the amount of electricity generated by the plant (generally megawatt hours) over its useful lifetime.
In other words, LCOE estimates are essentially like calculating the cost of your car on a per-mile-driven basis after accounting for expenses like initial capital investment, loan and insurance payments, fuel costs, and maintenance.
We can estimate the LCOE of new solar facilities in Mississippi by using overnight capital cost estimates from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) Electricity Market Module and other state-specific factors. We can then compare the cost of solar to the real-world cost data for the coal and natural gas generators at the Victor J. Daniel Jr. Generating Plant, and the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant using the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Form 1 database.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
The Most Egregious Mistake
The U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood…
It is the miscalculation of this era – one that may begin the collapse of dollar primacy, and therefore, global compliance with U.S. political demands, too. But its most grievous content is that it corners the U.S. into promoting dangerous Ukrainian escalation against Russia directly (i.e. Crimea).
Washington dares not – indeed cannot – yield on dollar primacy, the ultimate signifier for ‘American decline’. And so the U.S. government is hostage to its financial hegemony in a way that is rarely fully understood.
The Biden Team cannot withdraw its fantastical narrative of Russia’s imminent humiliation; they have bet the House on it.
Yet it has become an existential issue for the U.S. precisely because of this egregious initial miscalculation that has been subsequently levered-up into a preposterous narrative of a floundering, at any moment ‘collapsing’ Russia.
What then is this ‘Great Surprise’ – the almost completely unforeseen event of recent geo-politics that has so shaken U.S. expectations, and which takes the world to the precipice?
It is, in a word, Resilience.
The Resilience displayed by the Russian economy after the West had committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia. The West bore down on Russia in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war – and with real military war as the follow-through.
Yet, Russia has survived, and survived relatively handsomely. It is doing ‘okay’ – maybe better, even, than many Russia insiders were expecting. The ‘Anglo’ Intelligence services however, had assured EU leaders not to worry; it’s ‘slam dunk’; Putin cannot possibly survive. Rapid financial and political collapse, they promised, was certain under the tsunami of western sanctions.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
World War III: Has It Begun?
World War III: Has It Begun?Has World War III already begun?
That’s a serious question and deserves serious consideration by investors. A wave of analysts and commentators have warned that the war in Ukraine could spin out of control and escalate into World War III.
One variation on that theme is that the war could escalate into a nuclear war with tactical nuclear weapons deployed. Most point a finger at Russia as the party that will launch a nuclear strike out of desperation at a failing campaign in Ukraine.
Actually, the opposite is true.
The Russian campaign is not failing (it has been on hold for several months awaiting the right conditions to launch a winter offensive). You just don’t hear about it in the mainstream media, which is essentially a propaganda outlet for Ukraine.
And the party most likely to use nuclear weapons first is the U.S. in order to save face and destabilize Russia once Ukraine is on the brink of collapse.
Reality Check
Many people have a hard time believing that. They’ve been told that Putin is the devil incarnate and would probably like to destroy the world. We like to think that in modern times we’re sophisticated and above falling prey to propaganda. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.
The fact is the U.S. did wage the only nuclear war in history from Aug. 6–9, 1945 and had a successful outcome. I’m not getting into the morality of it here, one way or the other. I’m just being objective.
Either way, another nuclear war could not be contained and it would be tantamount to World War III. It amounts to the same thing.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Soaring Food Prices Prompt Eurasian Nations To Ban Food Exports
The harshest winter since 2008 is contributing to shortages of staple vegetables across Central Asia and sending prices north in a region still suffering from COVID-induced food inflation.
In Uzbekistan, record frosts have highlighted the shortcomings of the national energy system as even residents of the capital spent days on end without power. But the cold has also hammered the agriculture sector in the region’s most populous country.
On January 20, the Uzbek agriculture minister announced a four-month ban on exports of onions after prices doubled in three weeks.
The title of the ministry’s press release – “there are reserves of onions in Uzbekistan” – hints at panic.
Once among the cheapest onions produced by former Soviet countries, Uzbek onions are now as expensive as onions from countries like Georgia and Moldova, the ministry said, reaching 6,000-8,000 sum (53-71 cents) per kilo.
While the frosts have ruined part of the onion stock in storage, that is not the only source of pressure on prices. Vast energy deficits have strained logistics, with gas stations shut down and roads covered in ice, the ministry said.
In comments to private news website Gazeta.uz, one resident of Bukhara region gave an account of this perfect storm: “Due to the closure of gas stations, there are problems with public transport. On Tuesday we went to the market and did not see a single bus. The only thing left is taxis. Food prices have gone up. They say that goods are not being brought from Tashkent. There are no sellers at the Kholkhozni bazaar because vegetables and fruits have frozen.”
Potatoes have also jumped in price since the start of the year – by 14 percent, reported specialist agriculture news site East Fruit last week.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Canada’s Bill C-26: Yet Another Government Power Grab
Technocracy – a 1933 cartoon by Winsor McCay.Soviet Era Ethos Stomps Privacy and Due-Process
Another doozy from the Canadian government.
Following along several other bills winding their way along the Road to Serfdom…
Bill C-11 regulates the internet under the CRTC and paves the way toward institutionalized content moderation, the requirement for licenses to publish online, and regulation of user generated content (in Senate)Bill C-36 the Online Harms Bill sought to designate political dissent as “hate speech” and invoked penalties for criticizing politicians (not sure where this one is at the moment).Bill C-18 throws a funding lifeline to Canada’s flailing agitprop industry (a.k.a the mainsteam media), in that it will require tech platforms to pay licensing fees for content the media outlets post there (passed third reading in November). This bill will reward big media conglomerates like Bell, while freezing out small and independent organizations.Here comes another one, Bill C-36: An Act respecting cyber security, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts, which passed first reading last June.
It’s been largely flying under everybody’s radar so far. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association has been actively raising awareness and Michael Geist had Brenda McPhail, their Director of the Privacy, Technology and Surveillance Program on his podcast last October.
We mentioned C-26 in AxisOfEasy #273 citing Gowling WLG’s coverage of it by Brent Arnold (Brent Arnold sits on the Internet Society Canada Chapter board, as do I, but I am writing this post from my role as easyDNS CEO, and not ISCC.)The Government Hereby Grants Itself The Following Powers:
The new bill is ostensibly a cyber-security and critical infrastructure bill, but it is riddled with nebulous, open-ended terms, Kafka-esque secrecy provisions, onerous penalties and conspicuously absent of any semblance due process:
…click on the above link to read the rest…
January 27, 2023
Highly-Cited ‘Hamilton 68’ Russiagate Tracker Is Total Hoax: Taibbi
Out of the caterwaul of cries proclaiming that Russian collusion, and Russian influence operations, were the only reason Donald Trump won the 2016 US election (a hoax funded and promoted by his opponent, Hillary Clinton), a website which claimed to track said Kremlin efforts sprung forth, and was used to justify baseless allegations;
Hamilton 68: a widely-cited, (indirectly) state-sponsored propaganda tool.
The website claims to monitor a secret list of Twitter accounts which they accused of Kremlin control, however it’s impossible to verify their claims as the group has never disclosed their methodology.
Former FBI counterintelligence agent and “disinformation” expert Clint Watts, the spokesman for HamiltonAs Matt Taibbi notes via Racket:
Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation”. It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC “disinformation expert”) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. –Racket
And now, Taibbi has torn Hamilton 68’s ‘black box’ asunder after reviewing the latest batch of “Twitter Files.”
As Taibbi notes via Racket:
Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68.
If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
A Dollar Collapse Is Now In Motion – Saudi Arabia Signals The End Of Petro Status
The decline of a currency’s world reserve status is often a long process rife with denials. There are numerous economic “experts” out there that have been dismissing any and all warnings of dollar collapse for years. They just don’t get it, or they don’t want to get it. The idea that the US currency could ever be dethroned as the defacto global trade mechanism is impossible in their minds.
One of the key pillars keeping the dollar in place as the world reserve is its petro-status, and this factor is often held up as the reason why the Greenback cannot fail. The other argument is that the dollar is backed by the full force of the US military, and the US military is backed by the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve – In other words, the dollar is backed by…the dollar; it’s a very circular and naive position.
These sentiments are not only pervasive among mainstream economists, they are also all over the place within the alternative media. I suspect the main hang-up for liberty movement analysts is the notion that the globalist establishment would ever allow the dollar or the US economy to fail. Isn’t the dollar system their “golden goose”?
The answer is no, it is NOT their golden goose. The dollar is just another stepping stone towards their goal of a one-world economy and a one-world currency. They have killed the world reserve status of other currencies in the past, why wouldn’t they do the same to the dollar?
Globalist white papers and essays specifically outline the need for a diminished role for the US currency as well as a decline in the American economy in order to make way for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and a new global currency system controlled by the IMF…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
