We May Be Sterilizing an Entire Generation

We are slowly understanding better the long term risks of the mRNA vaccines.

Via Mercola

Story at-a-glance

• Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and toxicologist, has called for an immediate halt to COVID-19 mRNA and DNA vaccines due to multiple safety concerns
• There’s credible concern that the COVID jabs will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may impair fertility and reproductive outcomes
• In the case of the COVID shots, important animal studies that help ascertain toxic and systemic effects were not done. We’re now seeing danger signals that are not being heeded. Preliminary safety results of mRNA COVID shots used in pregnant women, published in April 2021, revealed an 82% miscarriage rate when the jab was administered during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy
• CDC data reveal more than 300 children between the ages of 12 and 18 have died from myocarditis, a now-recognized side effect of the COVID jab, yet the shot is now authorized for children as young as 5
• Since the COVID gene therapies do not prevent infection, but only lessen symptoms, they are actually a treatment, not a prevention. And there are far safer and more effective treatment available, including nebulized peroxide, ozone therapy, and hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin regimens

Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist and toxicologist and director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services LLC. April 23, 2021, she delivered a three-minute public comment to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

Her expertise is analysis of pharmacological dose-responses, mechanistic biology and complex toxicity dynamics. In her ACIP comment (see video below), Lindsay described how she aided the development of a contraceptive vaccine in the 1990s that ended up causing unintended autoimmune destruction and sterility in animals which, despite careful pre-analysis, had not been predicted. She explains:

“We were developing what was meant to be a temporary contraceptive vaccine, which was very attractive because it prevented fertilization rather than preventing implantation — or it should have; that was the idea.

Unfortunately, even though quite a bit of analysis was done in different animal models to make sure that it did not have an autoimmune action, it did end up having an autoimmune action and caused complete ovarian destruction.

Now it’s used in that manner [for permanent sterilization] in dogs, cats and other animals. So, that’s a cautionary tale of how animal studies can help us avoid mistakes in humans when they’re used properly, and when proper animal studies are done.”

 

At the time, she called for an immediate halt to COVID-19 mRNA and DNA vaccines due to safety concerns on multiple fronts. In particular, she noted there is credible concern that they will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may “impair fertility and reproductive outcomes.”

Not a single study has disproven this hypothesis, she noted. Another theory of how these injections might impair fertility can be found in a 2006 study,¹ which showed sperm can take up foreign mRNA, convert it into DNA, and release it as little pellets (plasmids) in the medium around the fertilized egg.

The embryo then takes up these plasmids and carries them (sustains and clones them into many of the daughter cells) throughout its life, even passing them on to future generations. It’s possible that the pseudo-exosomes that are the mRNA contents would be perfect for supplying the sperm with mRNA for the spike protein.

So, potentially, a vaccinated woman who gets pregnant with an embryo that can (via the sperms’ plasmids) synthesize the spike protein according to the instructions in the vaccine, would have an immune capacity to attack that embryo because of the “foreign” protein it displays on its cells. This then would cause a miscarriage.

“We could potentially be sterilizing an entire generation,” Lindsey warned. The fact that there have been live births following COVID-19 vaccination is not proof that these injections do not have a reproductive effect, she said.

Lindsay also pointed out that reports of menstrual irregularities and vaginal hemorrhaging in women who have received the injections number in the thousands,^2,3,4 and this too hints at reproductive effects. In this interview, we dive deeper into these mechanisms.

Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong

When asked how she ended up getting so passionately involved in this controversial topic, Lindsay replies:

“I became interested in the issue because science was not making sense anymore. For instance, herd immunity was being redefined. Herd immunity has always been defined by a combination of the natural infection with vaccination practices that work.

Suddenly, herd immunity was changed to only being attained through vaccination, and I knew that that was horribly wrong, yet it was being touted everywhere. It was certainly being touted by [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and others who know better.

Other things were also happening within the scientific world. Two of our top tier journals, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, published fraudulent hydroxychloroquine studies.

Ostensibly they had gone through peer review, and it should’ve been easy to catch the errors in these studies — as well as many other studies that allow for the emergency use authorization of these gene therapies — and they weren’t caught.

Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are very safe. They’ve been used safely in pregnant women and children for decades, and suddenly they were being vilified as if they were not safe. As a toxicologist, I know they are safe.

So, these types of things really piqued my attention along with all of the stuff going on in the background with respect to the New World Order and the agenda set by the World Economic Forum, and our joining into this, along with so many other countries, despite their intent, their materials, which claim life will be changed as we know it.

We will ‘own nothing and be happy [about it]’ in just a few years. All of these things converged for me into a sense that something had gone horribly wrong, that our regulatory institutes were captured, and that our scientific journals were not being honest anymore …

There’s a paper that came out in 2006 called ‘Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza.’⁵ This paper is wonderful. It goes through World Health Organization and CDC guidelines on how to react during a pandemic, what works and what doesn’t work, and it clearly points out that masks don’t work.

They knew at that point they don’t work. Travel lockdowns don’t work. It’s a wonderful paper to basically go through everything we have done in response to this pandemic, and say that’s an inappropriate way to respond, and we have scientific data that proves it. So, I encourage everybody to go back to that paper … to really see how crazy we’ve gotten in the mandates that make no scientific sense at all.”

Massive Danger Signal Is Being Ignored

As noted by Lindsay, in the case of the COVID shots, important animal studies that help ascertain toxic and systemic effects were not done. But we’re still seeing danger signals that need to be heeded.

Preliminary safety results of mRNA COVID shots used in pregnant women, based on data from the V-Safe Registry, were published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in April 2021.⁶

According to this paper, the miscarriage rate within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy was 12.5%, which is only slightly above the normal average of 10%. (Looking at statistical data, the risk of miscarriage drops from an overall, average risk rate of 21.3% for the duration of the pregnancy as a whole, to just 5% between Weeks 6 and 7, all the way down to 1% between Weeks 14 and 20.⁷)

However, there’s a distinct problem with this calculation, as highlighted by Drs. Ira Bernstein and Sanja Jovanovic, and Deann McLeod, HBSc, of Toronto. In a May 28, 2021, letter to the editor, they pointed out that:⁸

“In table 4, the authors report a rate of spontaneous abortions <20 weeks (SA) of 12.5% (104 abortions/827 completed pregnancies). However, this rate should be based on the number of women who were at risk of an SA due to vaccine receipt and should exclude the 700 women who were vaccinated in their third-trimester (104/127 = 82%).”

In other words, when you exclude women who got the shot in their third trimester (since the third trimester is AFTER week 20 and therefore should not be counted when determining miscarriage rate among those injected BEFORE week 20), the miscarriage rate is a whopping 82%.

Of those 104 miscarriages, 96 of them occurred before 13 weeks of gestation, which strongly suggests that getting a COVID shot during the first trimester is an absolute recipe for disaster.

“They concluded, very fraudulently, in my estimation, that it was safe to vaccinate in the third trimester, and said nothing about the clear safety signal in the first trimester,” Lindsay says. “It’s just so dishonest, so purposefully manipulative.”

As for the women who get the shot in their third trimester, there’s still no telling what the ramifications might be in the long term.

“We just don’t know, and that’s the problem,” Lindsay says. “There are all kinds of things that can go wrong with these types of therapies, and have gone wrong in animal models. We don’t know what will happen in the future for these women or for their children. This could be passed on.

We’re seeing now a lot of mention of constitutive expression, whether that’s failure of the mRNA to degrade or integration into the genome. That’s still being investigated.”

Children Are Dying From COVID Jab-Induced Myocarditis

Lindsay goes on to cite a CDC report that shows more than 300 children between the ages of 12 and 18 have died from myocarditis, a now-recognized side effect of the COVID jab.

We also know, based in part on whistleblower testimony, that more than 50,000 Americans have died within three days of these shots,^9,10 and that’s just from one database (the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System or VAERS). There are 10 other databases that feed into the CDC that the public does not have access to.

“This many deaths, it’s appalling and alarming,” Lindsay says. “Dr. Peter McCullough says the safety signal for typical vaccines, other than this gene therapy, would’ve been around 186 total. We’re now up to [17,128 reported deaths in VAERS, as of October 15, 2021¹¹], but they haven’t paused this in children.

They have not paused this while they’re investigating the myocarditis. Instead, they’re pushing it even more. Has this ever happened before? I mean, does this happen in a scenario where the population is at essentially zero risk for the disease? …

The cardiac deaths alone in perfectly healthy kids, and pulmonary embolism deaths in kids, should’ve stopped this. They are at no risk [from COVID-19]. There is no reason to vaccinate them, absolutely zero reason to give them these gene therapies because they’re at no risk [from the infection] …

You know [the shot] is causing heart failure, pulmonary emboli, cardiac arrest in healthy teenagers, and you’re not pausing to investigate the risk versus reward scenario? Something is horribly wrong.

Unfortunately, our regulatory institutions are not going to stop this. They’ve clearly been captured. It’s something that we’re going to have to do. Vaccinated and non-vaccinated must stand together to say, ‘No, you’re not going to experiment on my children’ …

With the RSV vaccines and the dengue fever vaccines, we had deaths in children that were much fewer in number that stopped those campaigns as well. It’s very, very clear — if you don’t get anything else out of this interview with me, understand that our regulatory and safety agencies have been captured.

They’re not doing their job to protect you or your children. You must not trust them, because they are not doing anything according to practices that used to be adhered to. It’s clear that they’ve been captured and compromised, and I hate to say that. I really hate to say that, but that’s the only logical answer …

We have all these breakthrough cases too. If you look at Michigan, and I’ve actually been privy to some other databases of true death numbers in different states [comparing] those who are vaccinated and those who don’t, and I can tell you that the media is lying with respect to the unvaccinated making up 99% of hospitalizations. They’re absolutely lying.”

How the Jab Can Sabotage Fertility

Getting back to the fertility issue, Lindsay cites a Singaporean study that examined the COVID jab’s ability to interfere with fertility by triggering anti-syncytin-1. The study included 15 women, two of whom were pregnant. She explains:

“They did something that I had asked to be done a long time ago, which was to measure anti-syncytin antibodies in an ELISA test. The syncytins are conformationally and genetically similar to the [SARS-CoV-2] spike protein, this fusogenic spike protein.

The thought by several experts was that you could have an autoimmune reaction to the syncytins by developing an immune reaction to the spike protein, and then that would prevent successful pregnancy.

But the syncytins are also important in a number of psychological diseases, such as bipolar depression. They’re important on autoimmune disease, lupus and multiple sclerosis. They are present in skeletal muscle. There’s some association with breast cancer. They’re really important ancient retroviral elements.

What this study found was extremely interesting. It found that every single one of these women who had been vaccinated developed autoantibodies to syncytin-1. Now, the authors kind of dismissed this and said, ‘Oh, but we don’t think that those antibodies were high enough to mean anything.’

But there was a clear difference between the pre-gene therapy sera [blood sample] and the post-therapy sera … What it shows is that there is an antibody response, and the significance of it, we don’t really know. But every single one of the women developed an antibody response that was different from the baseline … and I think that’s probably what’s causing some of these pregnancy losses.”

Are COVID Jabs a Population-Wide Immunocontraceptive?

When asked what she thinks the motive behind this mass injection campaign might be, considering the clear danger signals, she replies:

“I certainly think that to discount that it is a form of population-wide contraceptive would be naïve. There’s a paper that came out in 2005. It’s called ‘Evaluation of Fusogenic Trophoblast Surface Epitopes as Targets for Immune Contraception.’¹²

This paper tried to find contraceptive peptides in persons that had infertility problems already that were isolated to placentation. So, it was taking a backwards approach, getting the sera from people who had fertility problems and trying to see what they had antibodies to that was causing the fertility problems …

This work was sponsored by the WHO and the Rockefeller Foundation [and the National Institutes of Health]. No surprise there. It was then picked up by a company called AplaGen that took it to patent in 2007.

These are 12-mer peptides, and there’s a series of eight of them that can be used to induce sterility. When they patented it, they also said that it could be used to ameliorate sterility. Interestingly, it was also associated with all of the things that we know syncytin is associated with, — lupus, skeletal muscle disorders, bipolar depression [and] a number of other things.

Even though they don’t name syncytin proteins as the proteins that are targeted, they worked backwards from these peptides, and then said they were a series of other proteins. Sometimes we know that proteins can be called the same thing in different discovery realms. So, that’s going to take more research, but it was certainly interesting to me.

What it really points out is that there were efforts to use peptides or immunocontraceptive means at the placental trophoblast interface to cause sterilization … So, it would be naïve to think that this was not on the plate for future use.”

How Long Will Effects Last?

An obvious question is, how long might these effects last? Are they lifelong? Of course, any answer we come up with here will be hypothetical only, as the studies simply haven’t been done. That said, with her background in molecular biology, Lindsay is at least qualified to theorize.

The mRNA is extremely fragile, which is why a nanolipid with polyethylene glycol delivery system is used. In addition, about 30% of the mRNA has been genetically modified to decrease degradation. As a result, the mRNA being injected is magnitudes sturdier than natural mRNA.

What’s more, the nanoliposomes allow for superior penetration into tissues, and we now know it spreads throughout your body. It doesn’t stay in your deltoid. How long this modified and stabilized mRNA remains viable is still unknown, however. A corollary question is whether this mRNA might be integrated into your genome to become a permanent fixture.

“The answer is, we don’t know for sure,” Lindsay says. “Of course, with the adenoviral vector vaccines [Janssen and AstraZeneca], they’re more prone to integration into the genome. We know that from animal studies and past experiments.

With the mRNA technology, we’ve never stabilized something like this in this manner. What we do know is that recent studies have come out — Bruce Patterson’s group and another group — both came out with the finding that the spike protein is being expressed, [it’s] present on monocytes, as far out as from the time that the people were given the gene therapy.

So, that gives us an indication that it is resistant, for sure, to degradation. The longer it stays around, and is resistant to degradation, the more likely that genomic integration events can occur. But I don’t know the answer to whether or not it will become a permanent feature.”

Make a Rational Choice

As explained by Lindsay, no coronavirus vaccine has ever been successfully brought to market, despite 20 years of effort. All have failed due to antibody dependent enhancement, where the vaccination facilitates infection rather than protects against it.

If all these gene therapies do is lessen the diseases, then they’re not a vaccine, they are a treatment. You have to use your common sense to say, why wouldn’t I use a treatment that has been known to be safe over 70 years as opposed to one that is brand-new, that is experimental? ~ Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D.

Now, we’re to believe a safe and effective coronavirus “vaccine” has been developed in mere months. She also makes another important point. Since the COVID gene therapies do not prevent infection, but only lessen symptoms, they are actually a treatment, not a prevention.

And there are far safer and more effective treatments available, including nebulized peroxide, ozone therapy, and hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin regimens.

“If all these gene therapies do is lessen the diseases, then they’re not a vaccine, they are a treatment,” she says. “They are a treatment that you don’t know the mid- or long-term consequences of, that have already caused a number of adverse events. You have to use your common sense to say, why wouldn’t I use a treatment that has been known to be safe over 70 years as opposed to one that is brand-new, that is experimental?”

Other Safety Signals

Aside from fertility issues, heart inflammation and blood clots, another side effect seen among the fully “vaccinated” is de novo Type 1 diabetes in adults. This makes sense considering Pfizer’s biodistribution study showed the spike protein accumulates in the pancreas. The natural SARS-CoV infection can also have this effect.

Type 1 diabetes is a serious problem, as it leaves you metabolically handicapped for the rest of your life, dependent on extremely costly insulin injections. Doctors are also reporting an increase in pancreatic cancer and acute myeloid leukemia.

Where Do We Go From Here?

“Many scientists and physicians feel as I do, and are trying to figure out where we go from here,” Lindsay says, “because our typical safety and regulatory agencies have been compromised.” She believes we need to continue sharing the data and facts that mainstream media refuse to discuss, and continue urging those who have received the jab to at least protect their children.

“We need to stand together as one people and say we’re not going to accept this, especially not for our children, and try to get to the bottom of this and see what’s really behind all these efforts. Is it really about a virus, or is it more about other political motivations and campaigns, as it seems to be?”

I’m less optimistic about the idea of breaking through the brainwashing to get people to not sacrifice their children. So many have their minds set in cement with the wrong information. They could have their brother, sister, mother or father get the shot and die with the needle still on their arm, and they’d still go out to get a booster the next day.

I’ve seen it so many times. My friends, their parents, their siblings and loved ones — there’s this barrier that prevents any openness to new information. They’ve made their decision. Mark Twain said, “It’s far easier to fool someone than to convince them they’ve been fooled.” And it’s true.

So, while I agree that we must keep trying, and have faith that truth will prevail, I also think it’s important to have realistic expectations. We’re up against the most effective propaganda campaign in modern history. It’s psychological warfare at its best.

From my perspective, being a pragmatic realist, I believe the best strategy is to reinforce and support those who didn’t buy into the propaganda narrative to begin with, because they don’t struggle with that cognitive dissonance. If we stick together and support each other, so none of us get sucked into the lunacy, then we can at least preserve the control group.

Ultimately, the truth will come out, as long as we can preserve the control group. In a year or two, or three, we will clearly be able to tell how devastating this intervention was simply by comparing the two groups. I suspect those who got the shot will be severely crippled in various ways, and those who didn’t get the shot will have far better health in comparison.

“I absolutely agree that we have to preserve a control group. We also have to think of ways that we can help those that have been injured. I brought this out in a letter I recently wrote, advocating for Dr. McCullough.

People who have gotten this inoculation, if they have mid- to long-term effects, if you deny that any adverse effects are really going on, then the efforts going into those treatments for people who are having side effects are not going to be there. We have to accept that these [side effects] are real in order to help people who have already taken the inoculations, and I believe we have to try.”

Now Or Never: The Great 'Transition' Must Be Imposed

 

 This article is a must read for the links it makes between apparently unrelated issues. In spite of all the rhetoric, the great reset will not be inclusive. You are either in or you're out!

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

A new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect...

Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020. This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this mRNA ‘surge’.

Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.

Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it “clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.

Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.

It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lockdowns, even in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.

The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked ‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?

Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.

Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised, roboticised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ – inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.

There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence.

A 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” by then dissident and future Czech President Vaclav Havel begins mockingly that, “A SPECTRE is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called ‘dissent’”. “This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting.” Well, today, as Michael Every of Rabobank notes, “the West has polarisation, mass protests, riots, talk of obligatory vaccinations in Europe, and Yanis Varoufakis arguing capitalism is already dead; and that a techno-feudalism looms”. Now, prompting even greater urgency, are the looming U.S. midterms. Trump’s return (even if confined just to Congress), would cut the legs from under BBB, and ice-up Brussels too.

It was however, precisely this tech revolution, to which Varoufakis calls attention, that both re-defined the Democrat constituency, and turned tech oligarchs into billionaires. Through algorithmically creating a magnetism of like-minded content, cascaded out to its customers, it has both smothered intellectual curiosity, and created the ‘un-informed party’, which is the today’s Managerial Class – the party of the credentialed meritocracy; the party, above all, smugly seeing themselves as the coming era’s ‘winners’ – unwilling to risk a look behind the curtain; to put their ‘safe space’ to the test.

Perversely, this cadre of professionally-corralled academics, analysts, and central bankers, all insist that they completely believe in their memes: That their techno-approach is both effective, and of benefit to humanity – oblivious to the dissenting views, swirling around them, down in the interstices of the internet.

The main function then of such memes today, whether issued by the Pharma Vaccine ‘Command’; the MMT ‘transition’ Command; the energy ‘transition’ Command; or the global managerial technocracy ‘transition’, is to draw a ‘Maginot line’ – a defensive ideological boundary, a “Great Narrative” as it were – between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes, and with that of any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative. That is to say, it is about compliance.

It was well understood that all these transitions would overturn long-standing human ways of life, that are ancient and deeply rooted and trigger dissidence – which is why new forms of social ‘discipline’ would be required. (Incidentally, the EU leadership already refer to their their official mandates as ‘Commands’). Such disciplines are now being trialled in Europe – with the vaccine mandates (even though scientists are telling them that vaccines cannot be the silver bullet for which they yearn). As one high ‘lodge’ member, favouring a form of global governance notes, to make people accept such reforms, you must frighten them.

Yes, the collective of ‘transitions’ must have their ‘Big, overarching Narrative’ – however hollow, it rings (i.e. the struggle to defend democracy against authoritarianism). But it is the nature of today’s cultural-meme war that ultimately its content becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking all sincerity at its core.

It serves principally, as decoration to a ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ can be raised up into a globally managed order which preserves the Élite’s influence and command of major assets.

This politics of crafted, credentialised meme-politics is here to stay, and now is ‘everywhere’. It has long crossed the partisan divide. The wider point here – is that the mechanics of meme-mobilisation is being projected, not just in the western ‘home’ (at a micro-level), but abroad, into American ‘foreign policy’ too (i.e. at the macro-level).

And, just as in the domestic arena, where the notion of politics by suasion is lost (with vaccine mandates enforced by water-cannon, and riot police), so too, the notion of foreign policy managed through argument, or diplomacy, has been lost too.

Western foreign policy becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather is primordially focussed on the three ‘big iconic issues’ – China, Russia and Iran – that can be given an emotional ‘charge’ in order to profitably mobilise certain identified ‘constituencies’ in the U.S. domestic cultural war. All the various U.S. political strands play this game.

The aim is to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) into mobilisation on some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly, in order to de-legitimise an opposition, or to justify failures. These mobilisations are geared to gaining relative domestic partisan advantage, rather than having strategic purpose.

When this credentialled meme-war took hold in the U.S., millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all; where things that never happened officially, happened. And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is. Or, were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.

Russia and China therefore face a reality in which European and U.S. élites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity and well-founded argument. That is to suggest, the new ‘normal’ is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive ‘realities’, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … and which are intended to bemuse adversaries – and nudge them off-balance.

This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the U.S. to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically. Which is to say gaining an ephemeral win of having prompted an favourable unconscious psychic response amongst American voters.

Russia, China, Iran are but ‘images’ prized mainly for their potential for being loaded with ‘nudge’ emotional-charge in this western cultural war, (of which these states are no part). The result is that these states become antagonists to the American presumption to define a global ‘rules of the road’ to which all must adhere.

These countries understand exactly the point of these value and rights-loaded ‘rules’. It is to force compliance on these states to acquiesce to the ‘transitions, or, to suffer isolation, boycott and sanction – in a similar way to the choices being forced on those in the West not wishing to vaccinate (i.e. no jab; no job).

This approach reflects an attempt by Team Biden to have it ‘both ways’ with these three ‘Iconic States’: To welcome compliance on ‘transition issues’, but to be adversarial over any dissidence to mounting a rules framework that can raise the ‘transitions’ from the national, to the supra-national plane.

But do the U.S. practitioners of meme-politics, absorb and comprehend that the stance by Russia-China – in riposte – is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation done to ‘make a point’? That their vision does stand at variance with ‘the rules’? Do they see that their ‘red lines’ may indeed be ‘red lines’ literally? Is the West now so meme-addicted, it cannot any longer recognise real national interests?

This is key: When the West speaks, it is forever looking over its shoulder, at the domestic, and wider psychic impact when it is ‘making a point’ (such as practicing attacks by nuclear-capable bombers as close to Russia’s borders as they dare). And that when Russia and China say, ‘This is our Red Line’, it is no meme – they really mean it.

Why Is Omicron Being Treated Like Ebola?

 Doctors are speaking. But the voices of reason are drowned in the non-stop noise of panic and fear. Governments must be seen doing "something" and that "something" is heavily manipulated for profit but also with ultimate aims which are often far from democratic to say the least. 

 Many times in the past, similar panics have occurred and proved that once in motion, there is simply no easy way to stop them. Least of all discussion or argumentation. The fire (fear) must exhaust itself. 

Authored by Professor Angus Dalgleish, op-ed via The Daily Mail,

As I listened to ministers react nervously in recent days to the new Omicron Covid variant, I began to experience an all-too-familiar sinking feeling.

Shall I put it into words? Here we go again, I thought.

Mask mandates have been reimposed in shops, schools and hairdressers, and new swingeing £200 fines will be levied on those who dare to break the rules.

Meanwhile, the inevitable chorus of gloomy voices has begun to sing again: that unholy alliance of scientific ‘experts’ who have been given blanket coverage by the BBC and Left-wing media so often during this pandemic.

The Government has used these voices as justification to impose fresh restrictions on our lives — as well as to threaten more in future.

The Government has used an unholy alliance of scientific ‘experts’ who have been given blanket coverage by the BBC and Left-wing media as justification to impose fresh restrictions on our lives — as well as to threaten more in future.

Mask mandates have been reimposed in shops, schools and hairdressers, and new swingeing £200 fines will be levied on those who dare to break the rules

Panicking

Right now, the key question is: are any of the new measures actually necessary?

Yes, there remains much we don’t know about Omicron, but the early signs are distinctly encouraging. Many patients have reportedly recovered quickly from what have been very mild symptoms.

Southern Africa, where the variant emerged, has largely avoided panicking. One German epidemiologist, Professor Karl Lauterbach, who is running to be Germany’s next health minister, has even said that a mild strain would be an ‘early Christmas gift’.

Given all that, how much can the Government’s hawkish approach truly be justified?

Very little, I would submit.

Yes, there remains much we don’t know about Omicron, but the early signs are distinctly encouraging

Many patients have reportedly recovered quickly from what have been very mild symptoms

Jenny Harries: Brits shouldn't socialise with people unless necessary

 

The real danger for most of us now comes not from Omicron or any other coronavirus variant. Instead, it comes from ministers and officials apparently flirting with taking us into yet another era of ruinous restrictions, cancelling Christmas or other cherished holidays, dashing all hope of foreign travel, wrecking the economy and otherwise immiserating our lives at the whim of the state.

Yes, a new, heavily mutated coronavirus variant has been identified. But Professor Lauterbach, a highly respected clinical epidemiologist, suggested yesterday that the variant might even be good news. Why? Because its numerous mutations — twice as many as the Delta variant that swept the world this year — mean that though it may well be more infectious, it could also be less deadly.

In layman’s terms, this means that more people might catch it, but not suffer serious illness. And that is a good thing — certainly compared to a very infectious, very virulent virus with the capacity to sicken or kill large numbers of people.

Anyone infected with a ‘mild’ Covid virus — one unlikely to cause serious disease — will still develop antibodies to guard against future infection. And the more people with such antibodies, the closer we are to the fabled ‘herd immunity’.

This, coupled with the help of our highly successful vaccination programme, could even spell the eventual end of the pandemic — though not, it must be said, the end of Covid.

This is the sort of grown-up discussion ministers should be having with us. Instead, by announcing new restrictions over the weekend, flanked by his two familiar harbingers of doom, Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, the Prime Minister risked terrifying large swathes of the nation all over again — just as they were beginning to catch their breath as the worst of the pandemic was lifting.

Anyone infected with a ‘mild’ Covid virus — one unlikely to cause serious disease — will still develop antibodies to guard against future infection

Coronavirus restrictions, it should not need pointing out, do not work in isolation.

A year ago, I wrote in the Mail how I believed that lockdown was a killer in the making far worse than Covid-19. Today, I stand by that view.

From spiralling hospital waiting lists and delayed cancer treatment to the horrendous impact on the mental health of the nation, I think we are seeing the tip of an iceberg of premature deaths from causes other than Covid — and that, in time, history will reveal the second and third lockdowns, at least, for the folly I believe them to be. That is before you contemplate the ramifications of our sabotaged economy: livelihoods destroyed by the enforced shutdown of businesses and High Street firms shuttered thanks to working-from-home mandates.

'Vaccines very likely to be less effective against Omicron': JCVI

It is imperative that ministers do not go down that dangerous road again — unless some terrible new variant or new virus with a vastly higher death rate does emerge.

Even the most fervent lover of lockdown would be hard-pressed to describe today’s scenario as an Armageddon-in-the-making, especially as the virus is behaving exactly as scientists always suspected that it would.

Just as with flu, it is likely that in years to come the world will experience new waves of this coronavirus. Crucially, there is no evidence that these waves will somehow be ever-more lethal. Instead, it is likelier that this virus, like most pathogens, will become less deadly over time.

Cautious

This flies in the face of those who favour the ‘just-in-case’ argument: that we must be extra cautious and ready to lock down early again, lest the new variant prove more dangerous than anticipated.

That argument was valid at the start of the pandemic, when we lacked treatments and vaccinations. But it does not hold any longer.

Today, we are well-versed in the ways of our foe. With a few exceptions (usually the unvaccinated), most people are dying with Covid, not necessarily because of it, while others have had an imminent death merely hastened.

Even the most compassionate individual must realise that public policy cannot be founded on trying to mitigate against a death that, however sad, was due sooner rather than later.

A long time ago, when I was a junior doctor working in A&E, I was initially amazed by the fact that among those admitted to hospital with flu and pneumonia symptoms were the young and fit. That is often the nature with the flu virus.

Just as with flu, it is likely that in years to come the world will experience new waves of this coronavirus

A percentage of them would end up in intensive care, and a proportion would die — just as they do today.

Each individual death was terribly sad, of course, but no one would argue they meant that we should change our health policy.

What a contrast with today, when we live in a country increasingly bedevilled by what the former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption has rightly labelled ‘Covid authoritarianism’.

Paralysis

Flailing Labour politicians, desperate for any stick with which to beat the Government, demand ever-tougher measures: work-from-home advice and yet more masks, with new lockdowns and furlough schemes waiting in the politicians’ arsenal.

In Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon exhorts her citizens to work from home while demanding tougher restrictions down south.

We are not dealing with Ebola, which kills up to 90 per cent of those it infects, but a virus which was found in one Cambridge University study last summer — thanks to vaccinations and better treatments — to have an infection fatality rate of just 0.085 per cent

Many of us are only too happy to let such Cassandra-like prophecies drift over our heads, but there are many others who have been frightened into what feels like near-permanent paralysis in the face of the news headlines and political shroud-waving.

I see this phenomenon among my own friends. There is a clear divide between those who, like me, think we need to get on with our lives, and others who still appear obsessed with Covid, long after the worst of the virus appears to have retreated.

Yet get on we must. We are not dealing with Ebola, which kills up to 90 per cent of those it infects, but a virus which was found in one Cambridge University study last summer — thanks to vaccinations and better treatments — to have an infection fatality rate of just 0.085 per cent.

By all means let us watch this virus closely. But let us also retain the clear perspective and the common sense that should hold in a free society. 

*  *  *

Angus Dalgleish is an oncologist at a London teaching hospital

 

 

Are We Already Living In A Brave New World? (16' Video)

 You can spend the day wondering about Omicron and why on earth the WHO could not use the letter Xi. If the new variant is more dangerous and the reason for the 32 mutations on the spike. Television will do just that.

But here's a much better use for your time: Are we there yet? In this world imagined almost 100 years ago by Aldous Huxley. 

Link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPkQ57cXrPA

Glasgow Was A Defeat For British Ambitions

 This is a good conclusion for the Glasgow show of the last few days, but more than British Ambitions, it is the reset nonsense which was sent packing back in Glasgow.

 I am old enough to remember that "islands" started sinking, in the press at least, in 1989 and would soon be underwater if we didn't do something drastic "before" the year 2000. Since, I started diving all over the place, and saw no drowning whatsoever, except due to human activities. No coral destruction except due to human pollution. We need to do more to save ourselves, (The planet is fine to paraphrase George Carlin!) but the efforts must be local, not global. Local people know what they must do and with the right incentives, they will. The cabal between large corporations and governments only serves private interests while having the community pay for it and professing through propaganda to do exactly the opposite of what we can see with our own eyes.  

Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearEnergy.com,

The Glasgow climate conference represents a strategic defeat for the West, and for Britain in particular. Boris Johnson unleashed everything he could muster. The royal family hosted receptions for multibillionaires. The Foreign Office sent climate envoys around the world.

Glasgow would show the world that Britain could outdo France’s performance six years ago at the Paris climate conference.

Wrong. Whereas the French knew what they were doing in Paris, the British were at sea in Glasgow. The result was a display of the rank amateurishness of the British state.

If Boris Johnson and his ministers had done their homework, they would have known they were on a road to nowhere. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol failed because it exempted the developing world from cutting its emissions. The West attempted to remedy this at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 with a climate treaty that would bring the major emerging economies under a multilateral regime of emission targets and timetables. The attempt was sunk by China, India, South Africa, and Brazil acting in concert.

The West accounts for a declining share of global emissions.

“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Barack Obama had boasted in 2008.

Obama and the West were desperate for a climate agreement to justify increasingly punitive domestic climate policies. The Paris agreement is the climate equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine, under which the captive nations of eastern Europe could do it their way. It signalled that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War. In similar fashion, the Paris agreement signalled that the West had accepted its defeat and had given up its attempt to create a multilateral regime of emission cuts. Instead, the Paris agreement is based on nationally determined contributions. Each party to the agreement would do it its way.

After Copenhagen, small island states lobbied intensely to tighten the temperature target from 2 degrees above industrial levels to 1.5 degrees. Their islands, they claimed, were in danger of sinking beneath the waves. The West swallowed the sinking island sob story, which is how 1.5 degrees came to be included in the Paris agreement as a subsidiary ambition to the 2-degree target. It was fake science, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) later confirmed. “Observations, models and other evidence indicate that unconstrained Pacific atolls have kept pace with [sea level rise], with little reduction in size or net gain in land,” the IPCC said in its net zero report.

Because Paris included 1.5 in its text, the IPCC brought forward the indicative timetable for net zero from the second half of the current century to 2050. In the waning days of her premiership in 2019, Theresa May decided to make net zero her legacy. It was incorporated as a binding target under the 2008 Climate Change Act after a ninety-minute debate in the House of Commons, even though MPs had no idea how much it would cost or whether it was remotely feasible. But one thing is clear: whatever net zero costs Britain, it is pointless for Britain to decarbonize if the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit. The regulatory-impact assessment accompanying the Climate Change Act signed by Ed Miliband as climate and energy secretary could not have been clearer:

“The UK continuing to act while the rest of the world does not, would result in a large net cost for the UK.”

The benefits of UK climate action would be distributed around the world, but the UK would bear all the costs.

The Climate Change Act was passed in the runup to the Copenhagen climate conference, which was supposed to produce a binding climate treaty. “Showing leadership through the Climate Change Act, the UK will help to drive a global deal,” Miliband asserted, showing that climate hubris is embraced by all Britain’s political parties.

Now, for a second time, a UN climate conference has produced a dud. The fantasy that Britain would lead and the rest of the world would follow has been exposed. The question mark over net zero has been answered. After Glasgow, we now know that net zero is all pain for no gain. With Britain’s political class committed to the disastrous, dead-end path of net zero, bring on the referendum.

PS: If you need to see the "real" problem, here's a good start!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yV3Uj8qbCU

China Will Not Be Able To Offset Its Property Bubble Easily

 Hiding the everything bubble popping behind an artificially created health crisis was a deeply thought out genius idea dating back to the initial scare of 2008. It is still an ongoing process and it is therefore difficult to know how it will play out in the end. 

But unlike the 1990 bubble which was confined to Japan, this one is worldwide with its epicenter in China and it is consequently from China that the tsunami of default will spread around the world.

While, Evengrande, the first blast, is still reverberating around the world, the 55 trillion dollar Chinese real estate market is seizing up. It will be relentless. As happened a few times recently, 1968 and 1989 come to mind, 2022 will likely be a year when history happens. 

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

No economy has been able to ignore a property bubble and even less so offset it and continue to grow replacing the bust of the real estate sector with other parts of the economy. Heavily regulated economies from Iceland to Spain have failed to contain the negative impact of a real estate sector collapse. It will not be different in China.

China’s real estate problems are three:

1. The massive size of the sector,

2. its excessive leverage, and

3. the amount of developer debt in the hands of average households and retail investors.

According to The Guardian, “China’s real estate market has been called the most important sector in the world economy. Valued at about $55tn, it is now twice the size of its US equivalent, and four times larger than China’s GDP”.

Considering construction and other real estate services, the sector accounts for more than 25% of China’s GDP. Just to consider other previous examples of property bubbles, the average size of the sector was somewhere between 15 to 20% of a country’s GDP. And none of those economies managed the excess of the property sector.

Of course, the problem of a real estate bubble is always excessive leverage. Developers take too much debt and the smallest decrease in housing prices makes their equity vanish and their solvency ratios collapse.

In the case of China, the level of debt is simply staggering. According to Messari Capital Securities, the average net debt including minority interests of the fifteen largest Chinese developers stands at 60% to total assets. Evergrande is not even the most indebted. The three largest developers stand at more than 120% net gearing. The top ten most indebted Chinese developers amply surpass the level of debt to assets that made Spain’s Martinsa Fadesa collapse.

Chinese and foreign retail investors are also heavily exposed to the real estate and construction market. Evergrande was the biggest issuer of commercial paper and developers’ debt was sold to small investors in different packages. Furthermore, Chinese families have around 78% of their wealth tied up in property, more than double the U.S., according to a 2019 study by Chengdu’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and BloombergQuint. China has also launched nine REITs (Real estate Investment Trusts) that raised more than $5 billion in just a week in over-subscribed offerings in a market that could reach $3 trillion, according to Bloomberg.

These three factors mean that it will be impossible for China to contain a bubble that is already bursting. According to the Financial Times, prices of new homes across China’s biggest cities fell in September for the first time since April 2015. New home prices dropped in more than half of the seventy cities relative to August.

With high leverage, prices that have risen massively above real GDP and real wages, and a population that is heavily exposed to the sector, the impact on China’s economy will be much more than just financial. Even if the PBOC tries to disguise the fiscal impact with liquidity injections and bank direct and indirect bailouts, the real estate bubble is likely to hit consumption, utilities that have built infrastructure around empty buildings, services and sectors that manufacture parts for construction.

The Chinese government may contain the financial implications, but it cannot offset the real estate sector impact on the real economy. This means weaker growth, higher risk, and lower consumption and investor appetite for China exposure. Furthermore, the central bank cannot solve a problem of solvency with liquidity.

Property bubble-driven growth always leads to debt-driven stagnation.

Will China Pop the Global Everything Bubble?

Just as the US, the most dynamic economy at the time, popped the 1929 bubble, it will be China's turn in 2022. But can it recover faster too? 

The line of dominoes that is already toppling extends around the entire global economy and financial system. Plan accordingly.

That China faces structural problems is well-recognized. The list of articles in the August issue of Foreign Affairs dedicated to China reflects this:

Xi's Gamble: the Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster

China's Economic Reckoning: The Price of Failed Reforms

The Robber Barons of Beijing: Can China Survive its Gilded Age?

Life of the Party: How Secure Is the CCP? (Chinese Communist Party)

These are thorny, difficult issues: a demographic cliff resulting from the one-child policy, soaring wealth-income inequality, pervasive corruption, public health issues (diabesity, etc.), environmental damage and a slowing economy.

What the conventional analysts do not fully grasp, in my view, are 1) the existential threat to the CCP and China's economy posed by its unprecedented, metastasizing credit-asset bubble and 2) its incipient energy crisis.

As I explained in a recent blog post, What's Really Going On in China?, the CCP and the government informally institutionalized moral hazard (the disconnection of risk and consequence) as a core economic policy.

Every financial loss, no matter how risky or debt-ridden, was covered by the state (via bail-out, refinancing debt, new loans, etc.) as a "cost of rapid development," a reflection of the view that some inefficiency and waste was inevitable in the rapid development of industry, housing, infrastructure and a consumer economy.

What China's leaders did not fully understand was this implicit guarantee of bail-outs--the equivalent of "The Fed has our backs"--incentivized debt-funded speculation as the lowest-risk, highest-return "investment," especially when compared to low-profit, risky investments in low-margin export industries. (Recall the average profit margins of Chinese exporting enterprises is 1% to 3%.)

This is the hidden driver of China's sagging productivity and economy: debt in all sectors is skyrocketing to fund speculation, not productivity.

This institutionalization of moral hazard has incentivized the least productive and highest-risk gambles--not just for large conglomerates like EverGrande, but for middle-class households who've invested in the shadow-banking system (unregulated private-sector pools of capital lent out to risky borrowers at high rates of interest) and bought second, third and fourth "investment" flats.

The contradictions in this mass investing of savings in empty condos are systemic and dangerous: 1) once a flat is rented, it loses value due to being "used" and 2) the vast majority of the market for "investment" flats is illiquid, as most new buyers want a new flat, not an old one, so the market for old flats is extremely thin outside the most desirable inner rings of Beijing and Shanghai.

This mass investment in illiquid empty flats has generated social and financial perversities: now that flats in desirable areas cost 30-40 times an average white-collar salary, young people must vacuum up the entire extended family's savings in order to afford a flat. Those young men who are unable to buy a flat find their marriages prospects are dismal.

One result of the marriage of state control and private-sector Wild-West speculation is a truly vast wealth-income divide that is bound up with corruption in a mutually reinforcing feedback: the richer you become, the closer to power you get, and vice versa.

Since China's informal shadow-banking system is opaque even to state regulators, it's quite possible that China's leaders do not have a full grasp of the extent of systemic risk bound up in the excesses of shadow banking. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld's famous dictum, this is an unknown unknown for China's policy makers.

This truly monumental accumulation of debt and speculation is now an existential threat to the Party on two levels:

1) since all bubbles pop regardless of any other conditions, when this bubble pops, the economic blow will be severe enough to threaten the Party's control of the economy

2) the crushing of phantom wealth will cause people to seek a scapegoat, and the Party is Target #1 since it coddled the well-connected and wealthy but did not protect the 99% from the dire consequences of the bubble bursting.

Having engineered the bubble's expansion by creating mountains of debt and implicit promises of bail-outs, the CCP and government have backed themselves into a corner: there is no pain-free way to deflate a speculative bubble of such astounding proportions.

Considering the life history of President Xi (especially his first-hand experience of the Cultural Revolution 1966-1976), his writings and his consolidation of power, it is very clear to me that Xi understands the bubble is close to escaping his control and so time is short and the policy options are limited to triage, that is, saving the healthiest and letting Nature take care of those closest to expiring.

I also see evidence that Xi grasps the absolute need to break the near-universal confidence that the state will bail out everyone who borrows and speculates so wildly that their gambles go bad.

The general assumption is that "China can't afford to let Evergrande fail" because this enormous conglomerate will obviously topple many dominoes, generating great financial pain.

I think the that President Xi's view is the opposite: "we can't afford to bail out Evergrande" because that would open the floodgates of moral hazard that Xi is trying to close.

The state bailing out private-sector gamblers (and state-owned enterprises) is what led to the massive moral hazard-debt bubble that Xi is determined to pop now while he still can control the process.

In other words, President Xi understands this is the do-or-die moment to regain control of an out-of-control moral hazard driven financial bubble, and the only way to do so is to push the losses onto everyone with exposure, the driver being the stark choice to either regain control by popping the bubble now or letting it expand and implode in an uncontrolled (and hence Party-threatening) fashion.

Xi concluded that the first step to being able to push the losses onto everyone with exposure to speculative bets was to consolidate power to such a degree that the usual self-interested factions that would use their power to evade the consequences could be forced to accept their share of the losses.

Given the history and structure of the Party, this required Xi to extend his control to levels not seen since Deng or Mao.

In my view, Xi correctly concluded the hour was getting late and the institutional resistance to the end of the implicit promises of state bailouts and endless debt expansion could only be overcome if his political power was near-absolute.

The popping of moral hazard and the debt-speculation bubble are necessary to preserve CCP and state power; half-measures that protected corrupt cronies would only increase the public's outrage when the bubble finally burst.

In this light, Xi's multi-year campaign against the most visible corruption and his recent touting of "common prosperity" have set the stage for his forcing the end of moral hazard and the controlled demolition of the excesses of debt and speculation that have harmed the economy and threatened the control of the CCP.

Now comes the grand ironies. China's ability to generate stupendous amounts of new debt basically bailed out the global economy in 2008-09, 2015-16 and 2020. Yes, the Federal Reserve bailed out the global banking sector (to the tune of $16 trillion in backstops and credit lines) in 2008-09 and inflated a speculative bubble in the U.S. by creating $3.5 trillion in quantitative easing, but China's expansion of debt was an equally important source of global demand, which is what stopped global economies from sinking into recession.

The cost of these "saves" were not understood at the time: the elevation of moral hazard to quasi-religious status in the U.S. and China and the expansion of debt-funded speculative bubbles to unprecedented heights.

There are only two policy options:

1) Grasp the nettle and refuse to bail out debt-funded speculative excesses, thereby popping the Everything Bubble, or

2) play the game of keeping the bubble expanding until it implodes on its own, an end-game made inevitable by the systemic instabilities intrinsic to bubbles.

Xi has correctly chosen Policy #1, and to do so has positioned the Party as the defender of the people, i.e. anti-corruption, shackling the Big Tech billionaires like Jack Ma, and announcing that the state will not bail out EverGrande.

The Federal Reserve and the political leadership of the U.S. have foolishly chosen Policy #2, inflating the bubble while letting the consequences of this moral hazard bubble--wealth-income inequality and corruption--explode higher, fatally undermining the credibility of both the Fed and America's political class.

As the supply chain disruptions have revealed, the global economy and financial system are tightly bound systems, and as such are extraordinarily exposed to the risks of cascading collapses as key nodes become chokepoints or break down.

While the Federal Reserve prints trillions to further inflate the bubble, the global energy shortages are already crippling key sectors in the economies of China and the EU. Reality is about to intrude on the Fed's fantasy that speculative bubbles can remain disconnected from the real-world economy forever.

In summary: the popping of the global Everything Bubble is not Xi's goal; it is the inevitable second-order effect (collateral damage) of China's debt-speculation bubble popping.

Given the tightly-bound financial system, the collapse of EverGrande is far more the story of dominoes toppling rather than direct losses: it's not the direct losses that will bring down the global financial system, it's the dominoes toppling as those who take the direct losses implode and become insolvent, missing their loan/bond payments, being unable to meet their counterparty obligations, and so on.

The consensus in the West is that China cannot afford to let its bubble pop because the pain will be so severe. Those who believe this have a poor grasp of Chinese history, especially in the 20th century.

If crashing China's bubble is the nuclear option, Xi has reason to be confident he can push the pain level to 11 and most will accept it, and those who don't will join Jack Ma in forced retirement.

I reckon Xi views ending moral hazard and popping the bubble in China as a situation that will only get worse the longer he puts it off.

The grand irony now is that rather than saving the global economy by expanding its own debt bubble, China will pop the global Everything Bubble. To state the obvious, being a linchpin in the global economy makes China a consequential domino. Anyone who thinks the Fed's speculative bubble in the U.S. can magically become immune to the collapse of tightly-bound dominoes is indulging in magical thinking.

China's extreme excesses of debt and speculation are already unraveling, and Xi is backed into a corner. There is no cost-free escape, only triage, and Xi has charted a path to preserve the Party's control by forcing everyone with exposure to absorb the inevitable losses when unprecedented bubbles pop.

 

Letter from Great Britain- [10-30-21]

 This post is only part of a document, "Letter from Great Britain" (see link below) concerning energy and how the world elites control the global agenda. These are two extremely important concepts to grasp in order to understand the headwinds we are facing. 

The energy transition is both a necessity and an absurdity. A necessity because we are facing depletion of fossil fuels and must move to renewables but an absurdity because the fanatical ideology which support the transformation is blinding us to absurdities. Base loads will never be provided by Solar or wind nor will batteries store any meaningful amount of electricity. It goes against physics! Conversely, gas is much less polluting than coal and nuclear ideal for base load. Ignoring reality can only accelerate social decline.

The second part concerning the GPPP is unrelated but just as interesting. Forget about conspiracy theories. We live in the 21st Century. The illuminati belong to the Middle Ages. Understanding how "power" really works is key to understanding what is currently going on in the world.

Letter from Great Britain- [10-30-21]

Gail Tverberg has a very well explained essay on how and why the global economy is facing unprecedented headwinds.  History tells us that when oil prices spike, recessions follow as witnessed in the 1970s and 2008.  This time will be no different – here are Gail’s conclusions if you do not wish to read the complete work:

“At this point, it seems as if complexity has gone too far. The pandemic moved the world economy in the direction of contraction but prices of fossil fuels tend to spike as the economy opens up.

            The recent spikes in prices are highly unlikely to produce the natural gas, coal and oil that is required. They are more likely to cause recession. Fossil fuel suppliers need high prices guaranteed for the long term. Even if such guarantees could be provided, it would still take several years to ramp up production to the level needed.

The general trend of the economy is likely to be in the direction of the Seneca Cliff (Figure 1). Everything won’t collapse all at once, but big “chunks” may start breaking away.

The debt system is a very vulnerable part. Debt is, in effect, a promise of goods or services made with energy in the future. If the energy isn’t there, the promised goods and services won’t be available. Governments may try to hide this problem with new debt, but governments can’t solve the underlying problem of missing goods and services.

Pension systems of all kinds are also vulnerable. If fewer goods and services are being made in total, they will need to be divided up differently. Pensioners are likely to get a reduced share, or nothing at all.

Importers of fossil fuels seem likely to be especially affected by price spikes because exporters have the ability to cut back in the quantity available for export, if total supply is inadequate. Europe is one part of the world that is especially dependent on oil, natural gas and coal imports.

            The combined production of hydroelectric, wind and solar and biofuels (in Figure 9) amounts to only 19% of Europe’s total energy consumption (shown in Figure 8). There is no possible way that Europe can get along only with renewable energy, at any foreseeable time in the future.

European economists should have told European citizens, “There is no way you can get along using renewables alone for many, many years. Treat the countries that are exporting fossil fuels to you very well. Sign long term contracts with them. If they want to use a new pipeline, raise no objection. Your bargaining power is very low.” Instead, European economists talked about saving the planet from carbon dioxide. It is an interesting idea, but the sad truth is that if Europe takes itself out of the contest for energy imports, it mostly leaves more fossil fuels for exporters to sell to others.

China stands out as well, as the world’s largest consumer of energy, and as the world’s largest importer of oil, coal and natural gas. It is already encountering electricity shortages that are leading to rolling blackouts. In fact, rolling blackouts in China started almost a year ago in late 2020. China is, of course, a major exporter of goods to the rest of the world. If China has major energy problems, the rest of the world will no longer be able to count on China’s exports. Lack of China’s exports, by itself, could be a huge problem for the rest of the world.

I could continue speculating on the changes ahead. The basic problem, as I see it, is that we have reached limits on oil, coal and natural gas extraction, pretty much simultaneously. The limits are really complexity limits. The renewables that we have today aren’t able to save us, regardless of what the models of Mark Jacobson and others might say.

In the next few years, I am afraid that we will find out how collapse actually proceeds in a very interconnected world economy.”  https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/10/18/spike-in-energy-prices-suggests-that-sharp-changes-are-ahead/

BUT – we all know who is behind this contrived crisis except that the great majority have no wish to acknowledge what is going on now.  It will be too late when they wake up and we will all be exposed to extreme global totalitarianism. Iain Davis has written many articles explaining how the global elite are planning our future.  This one is well worth reading as it explains much about our present dilemma.  Here is the start of his explanations.

“The Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP) is a world-wide network of stakeholder capitalists and their partners.

This collective of stakeholders (the capitalists and their partners) comprises global corporations (including central banks), philanthropic foundations (multi-billionaire philanthropists), policy think-tanks, governments (and their agencies), non-governmental organisations, selected academic & scientific institutions, global charities, the labour unions and other chosen “thought leaders.”

The GPPP controls global finance and the world’s economy. It sets world, national and local policy (via global governance) and then promotes those policies using the mainstream media (MSM) corporations who are also “partners” within the GPPP.

Often those policies are devised by the think-tanks before being adopted by governments, who are also GPPP partners. Government is the process of transforming GPPP global governance into hard policy, legislation and law.

Under our current model of Westphalian national sovereignty, the government of one nation cannot make legislation or law in another. However, through global governance, the GPPP create policy initiatives at the global level which then cascade down to people in every nation. This typically occurs via an intermediary policy distributor, such as the IMF or IPCC, and national government then enact the recommended policies.

The policy trajectory is set internationally by the authorised definition of problems and their prescribed solutions. Once the GPPP enforce the consensus internationally, the policy framework is set. The GPPP stakeholder partners then collaborate to ensure the desired policies are developed, implemented and enforced. This is the oft quoted “international rules based system.” 

In this way the GPPP control many nations at once without having to resort to legislation. This has the added advantage of making any legal challenge to the decisions made by the most senior partners in the GPPP (it is an authoritarian hierarchy) extremely difficult.”

He ends his excellent article with the following observations: “While, in theory, governments do not have to implement GPPP policy, the reality is that they do. Global policies have been an increasing facet of our lives in the post WW2 era. The mechanism of translating GPPP policy initiatives, first into national and then regional and eventually local policy, can be clearly identified by looking at sustainable development.

In 1972 the privately funded, independent policy think-tank the Club of Rome (CoR) published the Limits of Growth. As we saw with the roll-out out of the pseudopandemic, the CoR used computer models to predict what they decreed were the complex problems faced by the entire planet: the “world problematique.”

Their offered opinions derived from the commissioned work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) system dynamic “World3 model.” This assumed global population would deplete natural resources and pollute the environment to the point where “overshoot and collapse” would inevitably occur.

This is not a scientific “fact” but rather a suggested scenario. So far, none of the predictions made have come to pass.

The scientific and statistical to-and-fro on the claims made in the Limits to Growth has been prolific. However, ignoring all doubts, the World3 model was firmly planted at the centre of the sustainable development policy environment.

In 1983 the Brundtland Commission was convened by former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harland Brundlandt and then Secretary General of the UN Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. Both were Club of Rome members. Based upon the highly questionable assumptions in the World3 model, they set about uniting governments from around the world to pursue sustainable development policies.

In 1987 the Commission published the Brundtland Report, also known as Our Common Future. Central to the idea of sustainable development, outlined in the report, was population control (reduction.)  This policy decision, to get rid of people, won international acclaim and awards for the authors.

The underlying assumptions for these policy proposals weren’t publicly challenged at all. The academic and scientific debate raged but remained almost completely unreported. As far as the public knew, scientific assumption and speculation was a proven fact. It is now impossible to question these unproven assumptions and obviously inaccurate models without being accused of “climate denial.”

This resulted in the Millenium Development Goals and eventually, in 2015, they gave way to the United Nation’s full adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), In turn, these have been translated into government policy. For example, the UK government proudly announced their Net Zero policy commitment to sustainable development goals in 2019.

SDGs were already making an impact at the regional and local level in counties, cities, towns and boroughs across the UK. Nearly every council across the country has a “sustainable development plan.”

Regardless of what you think about the global threats we may or may not face, the origin and the distribution pathway of the resultant policy is clear. A privately funded, globalist think-tank was the driver of a policy agenda which led to the creation of a global policy framework, adopted by governments the world over, which has impacted communities in nearly every corner of the Earth.

SDGs are just one among numerous examples of GPPP global governance in action. The elected politician’s role in this process is negligible. They merely serve to implement and sell the policy to the public.

It doesn’t matter who you elect, the policy trajectory is set at the global governance level. This is the dictatorial nature of the GPPP and nothing could be less democratic.”

https://off-guardian.org/2021/10/20/what-is-the-global-public-private-partnership/