Today’s News 31st October 2022

• Johnstone: The Official Narrative On Ukraine
  Johnstone: The Official Narrative On Ukraine

  Authored by Cautlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

  The official narrative promoted by the entire western political/media class is that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February of this year solely because he is evil and hates freedom. He wants to conquer as much of Europe as possible because he cannot stand free democracies, because he is another Adolf Hitler.

  

  The official narrative is that while Russia is in Ukraine solely because its leader is an evil monster like Hitler, the US is in Ukraine solely because its leaders are righteous. The United States is providing arms, military intelligence, and assistance on the ground from special ops forces and CIA officers to Ukraine, as well as implementing an unprecedented regime of economic warfare against Russia, solely because the US loves its good friends the Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.

  If you dispute any part of the official Ukraine narrative, you are an evil monster, and a disinformation agent. Because Vladimir Putin is the same as Adolf Hitler, you are also the same as Neville Chamberlain, and are guilty of the cardinal sin of supporting appeasement.

  

  Because you are an evil disinformation agent Neville Chamberlain appeasement monster, it is legitimate to censor you. It is legitimate to accuse you of being secretly paid by the Russian government. It is legitimate to swarm you with coordinated astroturf trolls working to shout you down and overwhelm you. It is legitimate to publish propagandistic smear pieces about you. All normal expectations of public discourse go out the window, because you are a monster, not a person.

  If you are tempted to ask questions which put a wobble on the official narrative, you must resist this urge at all cost. Don’t ask why western officials, scholars and strategists have spent years warning that the actions of western governments would lead to this war. Don’t ask what people are talking about when they say the US provoked this war, or when they say the US is using this war to advance strategic agendas it has had in place for years, or when they suggest that these things might have something to do with why the US is obstructing diplomatic solutions at every turn. If you ask questions like these, you are the worst person in the world.

  Per the official narrative, if you confront powerful lawmakers on their support for US interventionism in Ukraine, you are “parroting pro-Putin talking points” and spreading “Russian disinformation”.

  Questioning officials of the most powerful government in the world about the most consequential decisions being made in the world is violence, and is not allowed.

  I am sorry, you all aren’t “anti war protesters”, you are dangerous propagandists who are literally making a mockery of the anti war movement.

  I have never had the pleasure of responding to 🇷🇺 ridiculous internet disinformation in person before. Thank you for the opportunity ✌🏽 https://t.co/xzTLQCymgO

  — Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 28, 2022

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  If you claim you are objecting to the US using proxy warfare in Ukraine on anti-war grounds, you are lying; you are not anti-war. You are only anti-war if you support the same positions on Ukraine as noted anti-war activists John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Tom Cotton, and Mike Pompeo. Anyone advocating diplomacy, de-escalation and detente is an evil warmonger, like Hitler. If you want to learn about the true anti-war position, consult reliable anti-war publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

  The official narrative on Ukraine is that the US empire and its media never lie or circulate propaganda about wars that the US is involved in. If you dispute this, you are lying and circulating propaganda. That’s why it’s necessary to have so much censorship and organized trolling and mass media reports reminding you how good and righteous this war is: it’s to protect you from lies and propaganda.

  If any part of the official narrative on Ukraine sounds suspicious to you, this means you have been infected by Russian disinformation.

  Do not breathe a word of the thoughts you’ve been thinking to anyone, or else you will be guilty of spreading Russian disinformation and will become the enemy of the free world.

  Remember, good citizen: we must oppose Russian propaganda at all costs to protect our western values of free expression, free thought, free press, and free democracy.

  So do not question any part of the official Ukraine narrative. Or else.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 10/31/2022 – 02:00

• Virginia Military Institute Went Woke, Enrollment Fell 25%
  Virginia Military Institute Went Woke, Enrollment Fell 25%

  Authored by Daniel Greenfield via the Gatestone Institute,

  The Virginia Military Institute is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the presence of women at the nation’s oldest state military college with an appearance by Kimberly Dark: a fat rights activist and author of lesbian fanfic who wants to “reimagine masculinity”.

  “Why couldn’t we see that America has been racist forever, sexist forever?” Dark ranted in a post titled, “For those who do not want a Trump presidency — this is what we will do now.”

  Under Superintendent Cedric Wins, this is what the Virginia Military Institute has become.

  

  Young men who once turned to VMI for its tradition of excellence and were eager to serve their country are now going elsewhere.

  “How have you benefited from adherence to your gender role?” a VMI diversity training presentation asks.

  The resources for it included journal articles like, “How Military Service Members Reinforce Hegemonic Masculinity.” There’s not meant to be any room for “hegemonic masculinity” at an institution whose students experience spartan living and the warrior tradition.

  The institution that gave us Patton, Marshall and Byrd now asks about your “gender role”, urges you to reimagine “masculinity” and spews hate toward anyone who happens to be white.

  VMI’s Preston Library’s DEI resources features “The History of White People” and “White Guys on Campus” discussing “whiteness” and the “habits of racism among white male undergraduates” along with the racist ravings of Ibram X. Kendi in “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”.

  The message at VMI is one of undisguised loathing for white people, injecting the ugliest racist concepts of critical race theory directly into the campus dialogue while trying to silence critics.

  Superintendent Wins, VMI’s woke head, has been accused of undermining its proud tradition and driving away cadets. His “One Corps, One VMI Unifying Action Plan” puts DEI at the heart of VMI and claims that it will “empower Cadets to gain strength through diversity, acceptance by inclusion”. But the cadets aren’t coming.

  Enrollment for the new VMI class fell by 25%.

  Wins blamed the pandemic and even falling birth rates, but that fails to explain why the number of freshmen fell from 522 in 2020 and 496 in 2021, to 375 now.

  It clearly wasn’t the pandemic. Were those the birth rates kicking in?

  The VMI Inclusive Excellence plan called for pushing “diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice” on students, faculty and alumni. It was based on the One Virginia Plan which declared that “Inequity is rooted in America’s foundation.”

  VMI’s Board of Visitors had already hosted a state equity official pushing critical race theory and the hatred toward white people of “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo. A good deal of effort is being spent on eliminating, renaming and “recontextualizing” historical elements of VMI’s legacy. And VMI’s woke personnel are overtly dismissive. A faculty member insisted, “We really aren’t military. I have a bird on my shoulder – doesn’t mean anything – just I am a field professor, So – compare us more to University of Maryland than a military academy.”

  VMI’s DEI training included “White Like Me: Race, Racism, and White Privilege in America.”

  According to the video, “white privilege” is “built into the very foundations of the country.” The video, with its racist attacks on white people, its partisan attacks on Republicans and promotion of Obama shows where VMI’s woke leadership wants it to be.

  Another video, “Disarm Hate”, uses the Islamic terrorist attack at the Pulse nightclub to “demand LGBTQIA equal rights, fight the NRA and challenge America’s obsession with gun violence.”

  Critics of critical race theory at VMI have spoken out through the Spirit of VMI PAC. Gov. Youngkin’s victory has brought a fresh wind of change to the racist equity systems imposed in the Northam era. But VMI’s woke leaders are doing their best to turn the proud institution into just another woke college campus. And the fall in enrollment shows that it’s working.

  Superintendent Wins has angrily fought with VMI alumni working to defend its proud traditions in clashes that have gone public. Arguing over VMI’s massive spending on “equity”, the superintendent railed at a critic, “You have no understanding of DEI or what it means, or how much of the funding for DEI is represented in our request.”

  To see what DEI means, just go to VMI’s DEI resources list assembled by Lt. Col. Ticen and Maj. Carroll that includes Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” which states that the 9/11 firefighters and police officers “were not human to me” and Ibram X Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” which contends that, “The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a race-neutral one.”

  If there’s any ambiguity left about how much the VMI administration loathes and discriminates against white people, there’s a direct link of “anti-racism resources” as a “resource to white people”. Black people and other races, it’s understood, cannot be racist. Only white people.

  The resources also include not only the 1619 Project, which claims that America was built on racism, but also “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution” and Howard Zinn.

  While trying to explain why students weren’t coming to VMI, Superintendent Win blamed, among other things, “Ideological differences among a divided alumni base.”

  But the divisions aren’t among the patriotic alumni who served their country, they were imposed by Win and leftists who are making VMI a divisive place defined by the ugliest racism.

  “Misinformation regarding our initiative for diversity, equity and inclusion and the thought, the notion, the misinformation about the institute and what it’s doing or what it’s not doing with critical race theory is certainly having an impact, we believe,” Win complained.

  Except it’s not “misinformation”. It’s the DEI agenda that’s right there in VMI’s resources.

  The Virginia Military Institute deserves better than Win and wokeness. So do the great men who came out of it. And their nation that needs the service of the heroes of tomorrow.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 10/31/2022 – 00:00

• "Textbook Marxism": Amendment 1 Would Be A Dream Come True For Chicago Teachers Union To Make Its Most Radical Demands
  “Textbook Marxism”: Amendment 1 Would Be A Dream Come True For Chicago Teachers Union To Make Its Most Radical Demands

  By Mark Glennon of Wirepoints.

  If approved by Illinois voters in November, Amendment 1 will give government teachers’ unions an unfettered constitutional right to demand not just anything in their interests, but in what they see as the interests of every Illinoisan. The amendment is not limited to employee matters at the workplace.

  Don’t take my word for that. Look at the first sentence of the argument in favor of it as written in the official summary as published by the Illinois Secretary of State: “This amendment will protect workers’ and others’ safety.” [Emphasis added.]

  

  That particular sentence is just about safety, but it shows the broad interpretation of the amendment beyond the workplace that government unions will assert. The language of the amendment itself supports that broad interpretation, and will extend to anybody’s “economic welfare,” which is pretty much everything. **

  What will government unions, especially radical teachers’ unions, demand with that new constitutional right?

  The Chicago Teachers Union has long been quite open about its purpose. It sees itself as the vanguard of a national movement, led by unions like itself, that is textbook Marxism.

  That purpose is well documented. It goes beyond the radical curriculum they teach in schools and encompasses an entire rearrangement of how America works.

  Among the first things we wrote about on this site, ten years ago, was the role of the CTU and other teachers’ unions at a Marxism conference held that year:

  The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond” between Socialism and teachers’ unions according to reports, and Chicago teachers were on the stage. Chicago Teachers Union [then] VP Jesse Sharkey spoke at one breakout session. Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike….”

  Since then, militant radicalism has become still more firmly embedded in the CTU. That history is well documented – quite proudly by radicals themselves. The International Socialist Review, for example, lays out a good history of the CTU, saying the CTU “transcended a simple labor dispute and was transformed into a social movement, with the teachers fusing their struggle with that of the community they serve…joining in the Occupy Chicago movement that pointed out the root of societal problems—social and economic inequality.”

  A Chicago Magazine column this year also described the “radical transformation” of the CTU beyond schools, citing a recent book on the subject:

   “From milquetoast to militant” is how Jane F. McAlevey described the union’s evolution in her 2016 book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. “If the labor movement’s instinct has been to reduce demands in order to sound reasonable, the new CTU took the opposite approach,” McAlevey wrote. “They led every meeting with school-based discussions of billionaires, banks and racism.” 

  It cites current CTU president Stacy Davis Gates saying, “There was a movement afoot to say our union has to be more than a place that bargains a contract for a finite amount of time…. Our union couldn’t be silent on what was happening to the children in the city, the families in the city.”

  And there was the solidarity mission of a delegation of CTU members to Nicolás Maduro’s communist Venezuela two years ago.

  

  Today, the majority faction in the CTU is CORE, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators. It’s “engaged in direct action such as protests and shouting down speakers at hearings, and developed a critique of education reform that connected school closings to other issues in Chicago, like the underdevelopment of Black and brown neighborhoods, gentrification, and financialization, as described here.

  The CTU is not alone. It’s the Chicago affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, which is equally radical and militant. It recently pledged $1 million to support the election to Chicago Mayor of Brandon Johnson, a CTU organizer who is already a member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

  Though the CTU today is technically limited to bargaining for workplace demands, it has already advocated for things like universal basic income, rent control and housing assistance.

  If amendment 1 passes, however, all those matters and more will be constitutionally guaranteed as legitimate demands in contract negotiations. Rest assured that the CTU and other teachers unions will be making those demands.

  Among those demands will be an end to parental control over schools. Parents across the nation have risen up against political indoctrination and sexually explicit “gender affirmation “in schools. Teachers unions aren’t happy with that and want control over curriculum to the exclusion of parents. Amendment 1 will give them a constitutional right to restrict or eliminate parental control.

  Another absurdity of Amendment 1 is that teachers anywhere in Illinois who share the CTU’s vision could choose to have the CTU represent then in the bargaining process. That’s because workers anywhere, under the amendment, would have the right to bargain through representatives of their own choosing. In other words, the more radical teachers could opt out of having a different union represent them and choose the CTU or any other representative.

  

  Militant radicals are chomping at the bit for the constitutional right Amendment 1 will give them: the right to include their vision of a national, Marxist workers’ revolution in their contract demands.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 23:30

• Did NikiLeaks Just Kill The Dovish Fed Narrative He Launched
  Did NikiLeaks Just Kill The Dovish Fed Narrative He Launched

  As Goldman’s Matt Fleury wrote earlier today, since Nick Timiraos, also known as NikiLeaks, tweeted that the Fed was going to slow its pace of hiking last Friday…

  The Fed is barreling towards a fourth straight 75-basis-point rate rise at the November FOMC meeting.
  ⁰That meeting could serve as a critical staging ground for future plans, including whether and how to step down to 50 basis points in December https://t.co/vPMSXDjHL8

  — Nick Timiraos (@NickTimiraos) October 21, 2022

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  … we have had one of the largest bouts of financial conditions easing this century.

  

  But, according to the Goldman trader, in the latest series of NikiLeaks tweets this morning, the WSJ’s Fed mouthpiece is seen as aggressively trying to dial that back ahead of the Fed’s meeting on Wednesday by suggesting that the US consumer is much stronger than otherwise perceived (this is dead wrong, of course, but as a reminder, this is all about setting up the narrative that contains the Fed’s reaction function):

  “Consumers have a big cushion of savings. Corporations have lowered their debt-service costs. For the Fed, a more resilient private sector means that when it comes to rate rises, the peak or “terminal” policy rate may be higher than expected“ (Cash-Rich Consumers Could Mean Higher Interest Rates for Longer).

  Household debt service costs as a share of income is historically low

  One measure of private sector balance sheets shows they are healthier than on the eve of any U.S. recession since the 1950s, according to Goldman Sachs pic.twitter.com/JP43dlbsNP

  — Nick Timiraos (@NickTimiraos) October 30, 2022

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  As Fleury adds, one particular comment in the WSJ article was “This is not the earnings season the [Fed] wanted to see” – indeed this slide from Unilever results this week highlights that corporations are pushing through price increases at increasing pace.

  

  Incidentally, Goldman’s chief economist Jan Hatzius updated his Fed hike estimates yesterday heading into this week’s FOMC and adds a 25bp hike at the March meeting. Which simply means that he is now aligned with consensus. His note is available to pro subs in the usual place.

  Finally, here is Nikileaks appearing on the Sunday morning circuit, with an even more vocal hawkish warning “Even though the risk of doing too much is a recession, the risk of not doing enough is that inflation just stays high and you have to have a bigger downturn later.”

  Translation: those who think the Fed would not dare crash the market 6 days before the midterms may want to reassess.

  The Federal Reserve can’t risk not getting on top of inflation, The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos says.

  “Even though the risk of doing too much is a recession, the risk of not doing enough is that inflation just stays high and you have to have a bigger downturn later.” pic.twitter.com/C4XTRysqWm

  — Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) October 30, 2022

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  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 23:00

• Newly Discovered Skyscraper-Sized Asteroid To Pass Earth On Halloween
  Newly Discovered Skyscraper-Sized Asteroid To Pass Earth On Halloween

  A newly discovered asteroid, known as 2022 RM4, is expected to pass Earth at 52,500 mph, or about 68 times the speed of sound, late Halloween night or early Tuesday, reported USA Today. 

  According to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, 2022 RM4 has an estimated diameter of 1,083-2,428 feet, or about the size of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper. 

  The asteroid will pass surprisingly close to Earth — at about six times the Earth-Moon distance — or about 143 million miles. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has classified it as a Near Earth Object (NEO) and a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA). 

  “This is very close for an asteroid this size,” tweeted amateur astronomer Tony Dunn. 

  No danger, but newly-discovered asteroid 2022 RM4 will pass less than 6 lunar distances on November 1. Possibly as wide as 740 meters, it will brighten to mag 14.3, well within reach of backyard telescopes. @unistellar
  This is very close for an asteroid this size. #2022RM4 pic.twitter.com/Z8khblg3Gq

  — Tony Dunn (@tony873004) October 5, 2022

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  USA Today said astronomers at the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System in Haleakala, Hawaii, discovered 2022 RM4 on Sept. 12. 

  The asteroid will be close enough to Earth that astronomers can record footage of it passing using telescopes. 

  NASA said Earth faces no immediate danger from 2022 RM4. But in the future, Earth could face a possible apocalyptic asteroid collision with other NEOs. To prevent this, the space agency is preparing to strengthen planetary defenses. 

  In late September, the space agency successfully slammed a spacecraft into a non-hazardous asteroid Dimorphos and knocked it off course. The future of safeguarding Earth from asteroids could come from NASA and other space agencies catapulting suicide spacecraft into NEOs.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 22:30

• Chris Hedges: Stop Worrying & Love the Bomb
  Chris Hedges: Stop Worrying & Love the Bomb

  Authored by Chris Hedges via Scheerpost.com,

  I have covered enough wars to know that once you open that Pandora’s box, the many evils that pour out are beyond anyone’s control. War accelerates the whirlwind of industrial killing. The longer any war continues, the closer and closer each side comes to self-annihilation.  Unless it is stopped, the proxy war between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine all but guarantees direct confrontation with Russia and, with it, the very real possibility of nuclear war.`

  

  U.S. President Joe Biden, who doesn’t always seem to be quite sure where he is or what he is supposed to be saying, is being propped up in the I-am-a-bigger-man-than-you contest with Russian President Vladimir Putin by a coterie of rabid warmongers who have orchestrated over 20 years of military fiascos. They are salivating at the prospect of taking on Russia, and then, if there is any habitation left on the globe, China.

  Trapped in the polarizing mindset of the Cold War — where any effort to de-escalate conflicts through diplomacy is considered appeasement, a perfidious Munich moment — they smugly push the human species closer and closer toward obliteration. Unfortunately for us, one of these true believers is Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

  “Putin is saying he is not bluffing. Well, he cannot afford bluffing, and it has to be clear that the people supporting Ukraine and the European Union and the Member States, and the United States and NATO are not bluffing neither,” E.U. foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned. “Any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer, not a nuclear answer but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian Army will be annihilated.”

  Annihilated. Are these people insane?

  

  You know we are in trouble when former Donald Trump is the voice of reason.

  “We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in world war three” the former U.S. president said. “And there will be nothing left of our planet — all because stupid people didn’t have a clue … They don’t understand what they’re dealing with, the power of nuclear.”

  I dealt with many of these ideologues — David Petraeus, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland — as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Once you strip away their chest full of medals or fancy degrees, you find shallow men and women, craven careerists who obsequiously serve the war industry that ensures their promotions, pays the budgets of their think tanks and showers them with money as board members of military contractors.

  They are the pimps of war. If you reported on them, as I did, you would not sleep well at night. They are vain enough and stupid enough to blow up the world long before we go extinct because of the climate crisis, which they have also dutifully accelerated.

  If, as Joe Biden says, Putin is “not joking” about using nuclear weapons and we risk nuclear “Armageddon,” why isn’t Biden on the phone to Putin? Why doesn’t he follow the example of John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly communicated with Nikita Khrushchev to negotiate an end to the Cuban missile crisis?

  Kennedy, who unlike Biden served in the military, knew the obtuseness of generals. He had the good sense to ignore Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff and head of the Strategic Air Command, as well as the model for General Jack D. Ripper in “Dr. Strangelove,” who urged Kennedy to bomb the Cuban missile bases, an act that would have probably ignited a nuclear war. Biden is not made of the same stuff.

  

  Why is Washington sending $50 billion in arms and assistance to sustain the conflict in Ukraine and promising billions more for “as long as it takes”? Why did Washington and Whitehall dissuade Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky, a former stand-up comic who has been magically transformed by these war lovers into the new Winston Churchill, from pursuing negotiations with Moscow, set up by Turkey? Why do they believe that militarily humiliating Putin, whom they are also determined to remove from power, won’t lead him to do the unthinkable in a final act of desperation?

  Moscow strongly implied it would use nuclear weapons in response to a “threat” to its “territorial integrity” and the pimps of war shouted down anyone who expressed concern that we all might go up in mushroom clouds, labeling them traitors who are weakening Ukrainian and Western resolve.

  Giddy at the battlefield losses suffered by Russia, they poke the Russian bear with ever greater ferocity. The Pentagon helped plan Ukraine’s latest counteroffensive, and the C.I.A. passes on battlefield intelligence. The U.S. is slipping, as we did in Vietnam, from advising, arming, funding and supporting, into fighting. 

  

  None of this is helped by Zelensky’s suggestion that, to deter the use of nuclear weapons by Russia, NATO should launch “preventive strikes.”

  “Waiting for the nuclear strikes first and then to say ‘what’s going to happen to them.’ No! There is a need to review the way the pressure is being exerted. So there is a need to review this procedure,” he said.

  Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the remarks, which Zelensky tried to roll back, were “nothing else than a call to start a world war.” 

  The West has been baiting Moscow for decades. I reported from Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. I watched these militarists set out to build what they called a unipolar world — a world where they alone ruled.

  First, they broke promises not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. Then they broke promises not to “permanently station substantial combat forces” in the new NATO member countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Then they broke promises not to station missile systems along Russia’s border. Then they broke promises not to interfere in the internal affairs of border states such as Ukraine, orchestrating the 2014 coup that ousted the elected government of Victor Yanukovich, replacing it with an anti-Russian — fascist aligned — government, which, in turn, led to an eight-year-long civil war, as the Russian populated regions in the east sought independence from Kiev.

  

  They armed Ukraine with NATO weapons and trained 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers after the coup. Then they recruited neutral Finland and Sweden into NATO. Now the U.S. is being asked to send advanced long-range missile systems to Ukraine, which Russia says would make the U.S. “a direct party to the conflict.” But blinded by hubris and lacking any understanding of geopolitics, they push us, like the hapless generals in the Austro-Hungarian empire, towards catastrophe.

  The West calls for total victory. Russia annexes four Ukrainian provinces. The Westhelps Ukraine bomb the Kerch Bridge. Russia rains missiles down on Ukrainian cities. The West gives Ukraine sophisticated air defense systems. The West gloats over Russian losses. Russia introduces conscription. Now Russia carries out drone and cruise missile attacks on power, sewage and water treatment plants. Where does it end?

  “Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia?” a New York Times editorial asks. “Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war — and if so, how does crowing about providing U.S. intelligence to kill Russians and sink one of their ships achieve this?”

  No one has any answers.

  The Times editorial ridicules the folly of attempting to recapture all of Ukrainian territory, especially those territories populated by ethnic Russians.

  “A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal,” it reads. “Though Russia’s planning and fighting have been surprisingly sloppy, Russia remains too strong, and Mr. Putin has invested too much personal prestige in the invasion to back down.”

  But common sense, along with realistic military objectives and an equitable peace, is overpowered by the intoxication of war.

  On Oct. 17, NATO countries began a two-week-long exercise in Europe, called Steadfast Noon, in which 60 aircraft, including fighter jets and long-range bombers flown in from Minot Air Base in North Dakota are simulating dropping thermonuclear bombs on European targets. This exercise happens annually. But the timing is nevertheless ominous. The U.S. has some 150 “tactical” nuclear warheads stationed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. 

  

  Ukraine will be a long and costly war of attrition, one that will leave much of Ukraine in ruins and hundreds of thousands of families convulsed by lifelong grief. If NATO prevails and Putin feels his hold on power is in jeopardy, what will stop him from lashing out in desperation? Russia has the world’s largest arsenal of tactical nukes, weapons that can kill tens of thousands if used on a city. It also possesses nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads. Putin does not want to end up, like his Serbian allies Slobodan Miloševic and Ratko Mladic, as a convicted war criminal in the Hague. Nor does he want to go the way of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. What will stop him from upping the ante if he feels cornered?

  

  There is something grimly cavalier about how political, military and intelligence chiefs, including C.I.A. Director William Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, agree about the danger of humiliating and defeating Putin and the specter of nuclear war.

  “Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” Burns said in remarks at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

  Former C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta, who also served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama, wrote this month that U.S. intelligence agencies believe the odds of the war in Ukraine spiraling into a nuclear war are as high as 1-in-4.

  The director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, echoed this warning, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in May that if Putin believed there was an existential threat to Russia, he could resort to nuclear weapons. 

  “We do think that [Putin’s perception of an existential threat] could be the case in the event that he perceives that he is losing the war in Ukraine, and that NATO in effect is either intervening or about to intervene in that context, which would obviously contribute to a perception that he is about to lose the war in Ukraine,” Haines said.

  “As this war and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength … Russia likely will increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength to its internal and external audiences,” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier wrote in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s threat assessment submitted to the same Armed Services Committee at the end of April.

  Given these assessments, why don’t Burns, Panetta, Haines and Berrier, urgently advocate diplomacy with Russia to de-escalate the nuclear threat?

  This war should never have happened. The U.S. was well aware it was provoking Russia. But it was drunk on its own power, especially as it emerged as the world’s sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, and besides, there were billions in profits to be made in arms sales to new NATO members.

  In 2008, when Burns was serving as the ambassador to Moscow, he wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

  “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.” 

  Sixty-six U.N. members, most from the Global South, have called for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, as required by the U.N. Charter. But few of the big power players are listening.

  If you think nuclear war can’t happen, pay a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These Japanese cities had no military value. They were wiped out because most of the rest of Japan’s urban centers had already been destroyed by saturation bombing campaigns directed by LeMay. The U.S. knew Japan was crippled and ready to surrender, but it wanted to send a message to the Soviet Union that with its new atomic weapons it was going to dominate the world.

  We saw how that turned out.

  Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR.  He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”

  Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”

  This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 22:00

• $35 Million Philadelphia Mansion Sells For Just $9.26 Million
  $35 Million Philadelphia Mansion Sells For Just $9.26 Million

  For a quick check-in on the housing market, lets move to the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia, where a mansion on the ritzy “Main Line” that cost $35 million to build has just sold for a measly $9.26 million. 

  In the town of Gladwyne, a 32-acre estate at 100 Maplehill Road just sold for $25.7 million less than what it cost to build, according to the Philly Voice. The mansion was “developed by Andrew Barroway, the managing partner of hedge fund Merion Investment Management and a minority owner of the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes,” the report says. 

  The land cost him $12 million in 2006 and the home cost $23 million over the next several years to buy. The home is a 13,000 square foot mansion that is built in the Gothic Revival style, the report says. 

  It was recently purchased by “a trust tied to the family of Thaddeus Bartkowski, the CEO of Delaware County-based digital advertising company Catalyst Experiential,” Philly Voice wrote. Bartkowsi told the Wall Street Journal that the purchase involved “multiple real estate agents” and other assets on the property. 

  

  Among the amenities at the 13,000 square foot monstrosity are a gym, an indoor swimming pool, a movie theater, a wine cellar, a “man cave”, vintage pinball machines and antiques that include a jukebox. Outside the home, it sports a tennis court, a seven-car garage, two hot tubs and a trail for riding ATVs.

  The home was first listed in 2016 with a price of $28 million, but the buyers it drew couldn’t meet the price Barroway wanted, the report says. He then tried to auction the home in 2019 with a reserve of $14.9 million and failed to consummate a sale.

  Then, he tried to rent the property for $40,000 per month, which he did successfully to Bartkowski. 

  Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather commented: “High-end-house hunters are getting sticker shock when they see the impact of rising mortgage rates on paper. For a luxury buyer, a higher interest rate can equate to a monthly housing bill that’s thousands of dollars more expensive.”

  He continued:  “Someone who was in the market for a $1.5 million home last year may now have a maximum budget of $800,000 thanks to higher mortgage rates. Luxury goods are often the first thing to get cut when uncertain times force people to reexamine their finances.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 21:30

• Hedge Fund CIO: "How This Time Might Be Different"
  Hedge Fund CIO: “How This Time Might Be Different”

  By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

  Different

  “The baseline expectation should be that the market pricing is generally right, and the mental model that served us well during every market cycle in recent decades remains the right framework today,” I said, seven of us taking turns, sharing market views. “In that model, the Fed will hike to somewhere between 4.50%-5.50% and keep rates there until something breaks, at which point inflation declines, capacity constraints ease, markets puke, and within weeks or months, a new cycle begins.” We were exploring how this time might be different.

  

  “But the preconditions for this cycle are wildly different from those we’ve experienced in our careers, dating all the way back to the 1980s. Heading into the 2020 downturn, monetary policy had lost its effectiveness. Rate cuts and QE were no longer able to stimulate the real economy, even if they could still lift asset prices. But unlike in previous cycles, higher asset prices produced very limited wealth effects, and instead amplified inequality, which itself had become a new kind of economic headwind and a growing political crisis.”

  “A post-war trend of deepening globalization was also reversing as we entered the pandemic. And the world was entering a period of rising geopolitical hostility. The pandemic spurred a massive fiscal stimulus, and this required proactive politicians. They had been absent for decades, neglecting to address our growing problems, like climate change, infrastructure, and inequality. With the rising post-pandemic international conflict, these same politicians now must also address inadequate military spending and the re-shoring of strategic industries.”

  “Naturally, this has spurred inflation unlike anything seen in decades. But will it sustainably subside as it has in every previous cycle? It seems unlikely. The government needs to unburden itself from excessive debts and entitlement obligations. With potential GDP growth of 1-2% per year, the only practical way to do this is by growing nominal GDP at very high rates. This year, for example, nominal GDP grew at a +7.26% annualized rate while real GDP stagnated at a -0.10% rate. That seems like a decent outcome for the government.”

  “So maybe we have years of high and volatile inflation as the global economy deglobalizes, re-shoring production, which is by nature a process of increasing redundancy while losing efficiency. That will keep certain supplies relatively low, and demand for certain inputs high. Whenever there is an economic slowdown, the government will borrow and spend more, putting labor to work on the numerous causes which we deem vital: climate, infrastructure, defense, strategic reshoring, inequality. And such capital allocation will be inefficient.”

  “It’s pretty easy to imagine the economy becoming rather dysfunctional if this is how it operates in the years ahead. The inefficiencies will drive continued inflation, which will hurt the baby boomers most, and this will narrow the inequality between young and old. It will hurt people with financial assets, narrowing inequality between rich and poor. And it will inflate away government debt and entitlements, which is far too high and requires a reboot similar to what we faced after the last world war. All these things kind of seem inevitable.”

  “We won’t know for years whether this new mental model for what to expect looking forward is in fact the right framework. So much will depend on politicians, policy, geopolitics, and how it all interacts with inflation. How this affects inflation expectations, which no one fully understands in a fiat world, and which have finally started to become unanchored, will also be critical. What we must do, is look out for things in this cycle that behave differently from what our old models suggest. The more persistent the surprises, the more likely it is that this different model should become our baseline.”     

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 21:00

• Russia Floats Basis For Putin-Biden Talks At A Moment Most Americans Want Diplomatic Solution
  Russia Floats Basis For Putin-Biden Talks At A Moment Most Americans Want Diplomatic Solution

  On the same weekend that Russia angered the West by pulling out of the UN-brokered grain export deal, which allowed Ukraine to ship its wheat and food supplies to global markets via an internationally monitored safety corridor, the Kremlin has floated a potential basis for “high-level re-engagement”, state media reported on Sunday.

  Despite this big step back on what constituted the only diplomatic ‘positive’ of the past months between the warring sides, Putin office spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with Rossiya-1 TV channel that talks with the United States remain possible if Washington “pays heed to our concerns.”

  Such an opening in negotiations related to the war in Ukraine would ultimately be contingent on “the US desire to go back to the state of things as of December-January” Peskov described, and the US must ask, according to his words: “what the Russians are offering may not suit all of us, but maybe we should still sit down with them at the negotiating table?”

  

  The last time President Vladimir Putin weighed in on the possibility came in statements earlier this month, wherein he stated, “there is no platform for any negotiations yet.”

  Peskov’s reference to the pre-invasion “state of things” in the December-January timeframe appears to be a reference to Russia’s insistence on agreement on a formal declaration that Ukraine would never enter the NATO military alliance and other “security guarantees”. This came in in the form of written proposals offered by the Russian side at the time, which both the Ukrainian government and West rebuffed. 

  NATO’s official line has remained that it would never allow Russia to in effect exercise any kind of veto power over who or who should not be considered for membership in the bloc. Complicating the possibility of any near-term reengagement on this issue is the fact that NATO countries have only greatly increased their support to Kiev, turning Ukraine into a de facto NATO partner. 

  And yet recent polling shows most Americans want a diplomatic track between Washington and Moscow, particularly given growing fears of nuclear confrontation. As one poll from last month revealed: 

  Nearly 60 percent of Americans would support the United States engaging in diplomatic efforts “as soon as possible” to end the war in Ukraine, even if that means Ukraine having to make concessions to Russia, according to a new poll. 

  The survey, conducted by Data for Progress on behalf of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, also found that a plurality (49 percent) said the Biden administration and Congress have not done enough diplomatically to help end the war (37 percent said they had). 

  Russian officials keep saying they’re ready for talks, Biden should listen. If he really thinks we’re close to nuclear ‘armageddon,’ it’s criminal not to pursue diplomacy.https://t.co/ng7MyaJzjV

  — Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) October 30, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Further, as Responsible Statecraft pointed out, the Ukraine war is not even among the three top driving concerns among the American public…

  “Just six percent said Russia’s war in Ukraine is among the top three most important issues facing the United States today, with the top three being inflation (46 percent), jobs and the economy (31 percent), and gun violence (26 percent),” the think tank commented. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 20:30

• Left-Wing Lula Narrowly Wins Brazilian Presidency, Biden Quickly Praises "Free, Fair, & Credible Elections"
  Left-Wing Lula Narrowly Wins Brazilian Presidency, Biden Quickly Praises “Free, Fair, & Credible Elections”

  By an extremely narrow margin of less than two percentage points, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) has beaten incumbent Jair Bolsanaro to become Brazil’s next president.

  

  The tight result tops off a dramatic comeback for the 77 year-old opposition leader, who served two terms as president between 2003 and 2010 but subsequently was accused of corruption and served time in prison for graft before his convictions were annulled.

  This result is historic as it marks the first time a sitting president in Brazil has lost a re-election bid.

  Echoing the Biden administration’s narratives, Lula focused on the risks to democracy from Bolsonaro’s far-right movement, framing the election as a choice between “democracy and fascism, democracy and barbarism.”

  Additionally, the far-left leader pledged to reduce inequality and protect the environment while preserving the country’s fiscal health (but caused consternation among some by offering few details on his broader economic agenda and refusing to nominate a finance minister).

  “Lula’s challenge of governing is bigger than that of winning the election. Brazilian society needs to be rebuilt in its institutional and fiscal basis,” said Carolina Botelho, a political scientist with the Institute of Advanced Studies at Sao Paulo University.

  “Lula will need to recover the internal and external trust of financial agents and civil society.”

  Amid extremely high interest rates and inflation, his plan to move away from the free market vision of the Bolsonaro administration to a model that puts the state at the heart of the economy will be a key focus for investors globally.

  Crucially, as The FT reports, Lula remains a deeply polarising figure and is also likely to face obstacles in Congress, which is broadly right-leaning.

  Lula’s bench of leftwing allies will occupy less than about a quarter of seats in the lower house, meaning he will need to make concessions to pursue his agenda.

  Bolsonaro allies will also occupy key governorships, including São Paulo – Brazil’s wealthiest and most populous state – which was won on Sunday by Tarcísio de Freitas of the rightwing Republican party.

  Finally, it took just minutes for President Biden to send his congratulations to the Workers’ Party leader on his success in “free, fair, and credible elections.” We wonder if the US president would have been so fast to congratulate Bolsonaro if the vote count was so close but the other way? (In the run-up to the election, Bolsonaro had persistently claimed Brazil’s electronic ballot machines were vulnerable to fraud, leading opponents to fear he was preparing a justification to reject a losing result.)

  

  Lula’s victory continues a trend of wins by left-wing candidates in Latin America over the past 18 months, most prominently in Chile, Colombia and Peru, as voters punished incumbents that were in charge during the Covid-19 outbreak.

  Good luck to those holding Reals when FX starts trading tomorrow…

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 20:04

• US Hospitals On Track For Worst Financial Year In Decades
  US Hospitals On Track For Worst Financial Year In Decades

  By Nathan Tucker, of Becker Hospital Review

  Healthcare systems in the U.S. have had a challenging year, and they are on track for their worst financial year in decades, according to an Oct. 25 report from Health Affairs.

  Dramatic margin fluctuations have characterized 2022, and U.S. hospitals are still operating substantially below pre-pandemic levels. Most metrics improved month-over-month in August as revenues and expenses climbed compared to July. However, most organizations are in poor shape with a negative operating margin, according to the report. 

  Several factors suggest hospital margins will continue to face challenges in the coming years. The labor shortage is noted as the primary driver for rising hospital costs. Nursing labor is a critical point as the report indicates hospitals have lost about 105,000 employees, and nursing vacancies have more than doubled. In response, hospitals have relied on expensive contract nurses and extended overtime hours, which caused labor costs to surge. The national nursing shortage is a continuing problem as a substantial segment of the labor force is approaching retirement, and the shortage of new nurses is projected to reach 450,000 by 2025. 

  Payment rates will eventually adjust to rising costs, which are likely to occur slowly and unevenly, according to the report. Medicare rates, adjusted annually based on inflation, are projected to undershoot hospital costs and are expected to widen the gap between costs and payments. 

  Economic uncertainty and the threat of recession are expected to create continued disruptions in patient volumes. While healthcare has been referred to as “recession-proof,” high-deductible healthcare plans and more aggressive cost-sharing mechanisms have exposed patients to costs, making them more likely to weigh them against other household expenditures. 

  Combined, these factors suggest that the current financial pressures are unlikely to resolve in the short term.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 19:00

• Iran Formally Accuses Journalists Of Being CIA Spies After Article Sparks National Uprising
  Iran Formally Accuses Journalists Of Being CIA Spies After Article Sparks National Uprising

  Iran has formally accused two female Iranian journalists with being CIA spies and the “primary sources of news for foreign media,” after they helped break the story of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman whose death while detained by so-called ‘morality police’ last month sparked a nationwide uprising.

  

  The accusation is punishable by death.

  According to the Washington Post, Journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi are currently being held in Iran’s Evin prison, where they have been since late September following the publication of their article and the subsequent feminist protests calling for the overthrow of Iran’s clerical leaders.

  In the joint statement sent to Iranian media late Friday local time, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and the intelligence agency of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the highly-feared guardians of Iran’s security state, accused the CIA of orchestrating Hamedi and Mohammadi’s reporting, and said “allied spy services and fanatic proxies,” planned the nationwide, leaderless unrest.

  The CIA, along with British, Israeli and Saudi spy agencies, “planned extensively to launch a nationwide riot in Iran with the aim of committing crimes against the great nation of Iran and its territorial integrity, as well as laying the groundwork for the intensification of external pressures,” the unsubstantiated statement charged. It also claimed without providing evidence that the two journalists were trained abroad and sent to provoke Amini’s family and spread disinformation. -WaPo

  The journalists’ editors have denied the charges, and said the women were only doing their jobs. 

  “What they have referred to as evidence for their charges is the exact definition of journalists’ professional duty,” said the Journalist Association of Iran said in a statement Saturday.

  Other journalists outside Iran told the Post that neither Hamedi nor Mohammadi were their original sources.

  “This is a threat to other journalists, other media that if they continue publishing the news … they are going to have these charges,” said France-based journalist Aida Ghajar, with the Iran Wire news outlet.

  According to rights groups, over 200 people – including dozens of children – have been killed during the crackdown over the protests, and more than 12,000 have been arrested. On Monday, authorities began issuing charges to some 500 protesters who have been detained.

  Meanwhile, around 45 Iranian journalists have been arrested according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

  “This scenario” of branding reporters as foreign spies “is the scenario that the Iranian regime always uses against the journalists.”

  How about anonymous government sources claiming that journalists are spreading Kremlin disinformation?

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 18:30

• Even Wile E. Coyote Didn't Hurt Himself On Purpose
  Even Wile E. Coyote Didn’t Hurt Himself On Purpose

  By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

  Last week we experienced an Everything Rally. In some cases, it was touch and go until the final bell, but it was a cross asset rally nonetheless. The S&P 500 was up 4% and despite some wild moves in individual tech stocks, even the Nasdaq 100 climbed 2%. The 10-year yield dropped from 4.22% to 4.02% and the 2-year yield dropped from 4.48% to 4.42%. CDX tightened 7 bps on the week and series 38, which just rolled a month ago, closed at 79 (the tightest spread since August). The Bloomberg corporate bond OAS only tightened 6 bps on the week, but that makes sense as “hedges” should be outperforming at this stage of what is still just a bear market rally. Commodities and commodity stocks also had a good week. I’m looking for the everything rally to continue.

  Clearly the next big event for markets is the FOMC meeting on Wednesday. I view this quite simply:

  • Do you believe that inflation is on a downward path now (due to a number of issues)? Clearly I do, as you can read in Inflation Dumpster Dive.
  • Would a central bank (which didn’t miss “transitory” inflation) be slowing or pausing hikes at this stage based on virtually every economic model? Given my inflation views, the answer would be yes.
  • Will the Fed really hurt the economy at this stage?
    • That is the question and is why I keep thinking of Wile E. Coyote. Tunnels that the Road Runner could run through would be walls when Wile hit them at high speed. Trains that somehow missed the Road Runner would run right over Wile. Then, as one very astute reader pointed out (in response to our Celsius 233 report), Wile only fell off a cliff AFTER he looked down and realized that he was standing on air! Maybe the actual inflation data isn’t enough to scare the Fed into pausing, but warnings from big tech should be! Maybe, just maybe, the Fed is finally looking down and seeing the warning signs and much like Wile, they now realize that they are potentially standing on air and are about to plummet.

  It may already be too late for a soft landing (or even a mildly bad landing), but if the Fed insists on 75 bps at this meeting and does not balance the outlook, it could get worse in a hurry. I’m stuck betting that unlike Wile E. Coyote (super genius who couldn’t see his own demise time after time), the Fed will start getting cold feet and unwrap fewer of their “Acme product orders” and leave the Road Runner (inflation) alone for a little while.

  It is a risky bet to have, but one that I like.

  One other thing that we’ve talked about seems to be getting some traction: the possibility that regardless of who wins what in the midterm elections, the politicians will be changing their tune a bit:

  • A group of Democrats published a letter (later retracted) basically calling for finding a peaceful solution to Russia and Ukraine. While it was retracted, there is a possibility that D.C. decides that politically it is better to find a way out of this war rather than prolonging it.
  • While politicians of all stripes remain focused on inflation, there are more soundbites regarding the state of the economy than there were a few weeks ago. Post-election, do we get politicians that are more worried about jobs than inflation in an environment where their constituents are experiencing truly awful hits to their wealth?

  Bottom Line

  Let the everything rally continue for now, and then get prepared for a “risk-off” move as the chain reaction that has been set in motion dominates the headlines.

  Lisa Abramowicz did a good job of trying to help me articulate the current everything rally viewpoint that is juxtaposed to my view that we are headed for a longer and deeper recession that will become obvious well before consensus sees it (Bloomberg TV at the 1:50:45 mark).

  Good luck and try not to let your inner Wile E. Coyote cause you to do anything that you will regret between Monday’s open and 2:00 pm on Wednesday, which is easier said than done in this extremely volatile market!

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 18:00

• Even The Goodwill Cancels Kanye West, Bans Yeezy Shoes From Stores
  Even The Goodwill Cancels Kanye West, Bans Yeezy Shoes From Stores

  Corporate America has spent the last few weeks canceling Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, after antisemitic comments. From social media platforms to shoe manufacturers to retailers to talent agents to entertainment companies — they all severed ties with the rapper who was just kicked off Forbes’ billionaire list. 

  The latest cancellation comes from Goodwill Industries International Inc., a nonprofit 501 organization that operates over 4,000 thrift stores across the US, that sent out a memo to employees to ban selling Ye’s Yeezy products from its physical and online stores. The Twitter account Daily Loud first reported the notice on Friday. 

  Here’s what the memo said: 

  Requested Action: 

  As we strive to maintain the most up to date product information on Elevated Brands available to sell we are sensitive to current events and take action when designers and brands do not align with our Mission and RISE values. We are currently removing the sale of Adidas Yeezy Brand product from all channels, Retail Stores, Boutiques, eCommerce and Outlets. as well from our Elevated Brands tool.

  The memo said “effective immediately” all eCommerce stores will no longer sell any Yeezy products. The same goes for physical stores. Any products on store shelves are to be immediately removed and placed in “trash bags.”

  Daily Loud provided an image of the memo that was sent to all retail stores. 

  

  One Twitter user made a funny comment, considering Yeezy shoes are very expensive and the chances of finding a pair at a Goodwill is near impossible: “The memo includes 6 photos of the shoes bc no goodwill has ever seen a pair of yeezys in their store.” 

  Someone else said: “If true, this is a meaningless gesture that helps no one & harms some people unnecessarily.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 17:30

• Shellenberger: Pelosi & Kavanaugh Murder-Plots Expose Media Double-Standard
  Shellenberger: Pelosi & Kavanaugh Murder-Plots Expose Media Double-Standard

  Authored by Michael Shellenberger via substack,

  The same news media that mischaracterized psychosis as fanaticism in the alleged plot to kill Pelosi also downplayed the assassination plot against Kavanaugh by an abortion rights fanatic…

  

  Journalists have described the alleged assassination attempt against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by a delusional psychotic man in explicitly political terms, but largely dismissed the overtly political motivations of the suspect in the murder plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

  David DePape, the suspect in an alleged assassination attempt against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wrote a series of right-wing blog posts in recent weeks. “Many of the posts were filled with screeds against Jews, Black people, Democrats, the media and transgender people,” notes The Washington Post. “In one post, written on Oct. 19, the author urged former President Donald J. Trump to choose Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, as his vice-presidential candidate in 2024,” reports The New York Times. “In another,” wrote The Los Angeles Times, “he called ‘equity’ a leftist dog whistle ‘for the systematic oppression of white people’ and ‘diversity’ a ‘dog whistle for the genocide of the white race.’”

  But the blog posts confirm my original reporting yesterday that DePape has been, for at least a decade, in the grip of a psychosis caused by mental illness and/or drug use. The Washington Post, to its credit, reports in the first paragraph that DePape’s blog was filled with “delusional thoughts, including that an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird” and that, as each post loaded, “a reader briefly glimpses an image of a person wearing a giant inflatable unicorn costume.” The New York Times acknowledged that, “mixed in with those posts were others about religion, the occult and images of fairies that the user said he had produced using an artificial intelligence imaging system,” albeit not until the 22nd paragraph.

  And now the mother of DePape’s two children, Gypsy Taub, has publicly confirmed that DePape has experienced psychotic episodes. “He is mentally ill,” she told ABC7, “He has been mentally ill for a long time.” Taub said DePape disappeared for almost a year and “came back in very bad shape. He thought he was Jesus. He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him. And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.” However, it is not clear whether DePape’s psychosis is a result of an underlying mental illness, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, or from the long-term use of drugs, particularly meth, which can result in psychosis and permanent changes to brain functioning. Taub’s neighbors, as I reported yesterday, said Taub herself suffered frequent bouts of paranoid psychosis and had repeatedly lied about them to the police.

  Many people responded to my reporting yesterday by noting that DePape may have been psychotic but that the real problem lay with right-wing conspiracy theories. “But even if you believe he’s psychotic (which seems plausible),” wrote former New Yorker reporter James Surowiecki in response to my article, “why did his paranoid psychosis take as its object Nancy Pelosi? Because of the ubiquity of right-wing conspiracy theories and the demonization of Pelosi by right-wing media… We can certainly get rid of conspiracy theories being mainstreamed on cable TV and social media by high-profile pundits.”

  But we can’t get rid of discussions of conspiracy theories because doing so would violate the First Amendment and, as I noted yesterday, psychotic people construct their delusions from whatever is in popular culture at the time to invent justifications for their actions. In 1981, a psychotic man named John Hinkley, Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan because, Hinkley said, he wanted to impress the actress Jodie Foster. Earlier this month, a man in Washington state shot two 40-something innkeepers because, he said, he heard the voice of Pope Gregory and John Paul say to him, “Are you going to let Bonny and Clyde do that to our family?”

  

  Law enforcement officers stand guard as protesters march past Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home on June 8, 2022 in Chevy Chase, Maryland. An armed man was arrested near Kavanaugh’s home that morning. [Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images]

  And if mainstream news journalists are so concerned that political extremism is resulting in more violence against public officials, why did they, en masse, downplay the assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June? Where The New York Times has put the alleged Pelosi assassination attempt on its front page for two days in a row, it buried the story of the Kavanaugh murder plot on page A20. Three days later, none of the Sunday morning political shows, such as NBC’s “Meet the Press,” even mentioned the assassination attempt.

  Today, “Meet the Press,” focused on the Pelosi plot and framed it as overly political, making no mention whatsoever of DePape’s psychotic delusions. “The chilling and violent attack on Paul Pelosi — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband — is raising fears of more political violence,” said its host, Chuck Todd.

  

  The double standard in news media coverage is brought into sharper relief when one considers that the suspect in the murder plot against Kavanaugh, Nicholas John Roske, 26, has, unlike DePape, shown no sign of psychosis. Rather, he appears to be motivated by the same kind of political fanaticism that has gripped climate activists around the world.

  Subscribers to Michael Shellenberger can read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 17:00

• US Financial And Political Leadership: An Embarrassing Shadow Of Its Former Self
  US Financial And Political Leadership: An Embarrassing Shadow Of Its Former Self

  In this brief yet engaging discussion with Jim Lewis and Ivan Bayoukhi of Wall Street Silver, Matterhorn Asset Management principal, Matthew Piepenburg, addresses further evidence of the U.S. Fed’s undeniable distortion of basic capitalism, social equality and global currencies.

  Matthew opens with a disturbing chart of the ignored yet undeniable wealth inequality (and transfer) created by years—as well as trillions—of misallocated mouse-click money to support a financial system openly rigged to favor a select minority rather than a national majority/economy. This misallocation, as warned by Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, has direct consequences not only for the financial stability of a nation, but its social and economic health as well. The evidence of such fracturing, of course, is now everywhere to be seen. As Matthew discusses, current economic and political leadership out of DC is but a shadow of its former self and founding principles. In many ways, the U.S. is becoming unrecognizable and one is forced to ask if the modern policy makers are innocently stupid or deliberately destructive?

  Equally important are the global ripple effects of the US Fed’s increasingly desperate and distorted actions. The strong USD policies intentionally and currently used by the Powell Fed have had a crippling and destabilizing impact on global currencies, from developed to developing, as the rest of the world has been forced to import US inflation and debase their own currencies to settle trillions in imposed USD transactions. In short, as the USD rises, the rest of the world’s currencies (and hence economies), friend and foe alike, are forced to suffer. As Matthew quips: “With financial and political allies like the U.S., who needs enemies?”

  Of course, the Fed’s current policy of a strong USD (and rocketing DXY) is as unsustainable as its is globally and nationally toxic/reckless. At some point the financial system from Tokyo to Athens cracks under the weight of a weaponized USD as more and more nations (i.e., the BRICS) look increasingly east toward new financial partners and alternative currencies to settle trades. Furthermore, with a recession looming (or denied), the Fed will eventually be required to weaken the Dollar and lower rates if it has any honest intention of fighting a recession. At that point, precious metals as measured by the USD, will surpass prior highs.

  Watch the full interview below (via Gold Switzerland),

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 16:30

• Morgan Stanley: Why Inflation Is Likely To Fall Faster Than Most Expect Based On M2 Growth
  Morgan Stanley: Why Inflation Is Likely To Fall Faster Than Most Expect Based On M2 Growth

  By Michael Wilson, chief US equity strategist at Morgan Stanley

  Two weeks ago, we turned tactically bullish on US equities. Some investors felt this call came out of left field, given our well-established bearish view on the fundamentals. To be clear, this call is based almost entirely on technicals rather than fundamentals, which remain unsupportive of many equity prices and the S&P 500 [ZH; similar to what Goldman said on Saturday]. The technical picture became more supportive, in our view, after the historic reversal two weeks ago on another higher-than-expected CPI reading for September. More specifically, the S&P 500 gapped lower that Thursday morning, only to reverse 6% and close at the highs. Then, on Friday, stocks had a terrible day, with the S&P 500 trading down 2.4% and closing on the lows. When we studied this price action over the following weekend, we found that Friday’s pullback was a 61.8% Fibonacci retracement of Thursday’s rally that stopped right at the 200-week moving average. The combination of these technical oddities was too much to ignore. Hence, our tactical/technical rally call.

  From a fundamental standpoint there are some supportive factors too.

  First, CPI is coming down. Granted, it is one of the most backward-looking data series; it says very little about the future and can be misleading about present conditions. Think back to what CPI was telling us at the end of March 2021. The index sat at 2.6%Y after the government had delivered more than $3 trillion in fiscal stimulus during 1Q21. As a result, the money supply (M2) was growing by 27%Y. Never in the history of these data (70+ years) had M2 grown at even half that rate. Given that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, it was crystal clear that 2.6%Y inflation was likely to explode higher. Fast forward to today and CPI stands at 8.2%Y, a 40-year high and marginally below its peak of 9.1%Y in June. However, M2 is now growing at just 2.5%Y and falling fast. Given the leading properties of M2 for inflation, the seeds have been sown for a sharp fall next year. The implied fall in CPI outlined in Exhibit 1 would be highly out of consensus, and while it won’t necessarily play out exactly as in our chart, we believe it’s directionally correct. This has implications for Fed policy and rates. Indeed, part of our call for a rally assumes we are closer to a pause/pivot in the Fed’s tightening campaign, and while we don’t expect to see a dramatic shift at next week’s meeting, the markets have a way of getting in front of Fed shifts. In short, investors may be as offside on inflation today as they were in March 2021, just in the opposite direction. One of the reasons why we did not try to trade the summer rally was that we felt it was much too early to be thinking about a Fed pivot. We turned out to be right as the Fed shift proved to be too far in the future to make the summer rally last. We’re closer today because M2 growth is fast approaching zero and the 3-month-10-year yield curve finally inverted last week, something Chair Powell has noted is important in determining if the Fed has done enough.

  

  Second, while we have been vocal bears on growth all year (calling for fire AND ice), that view is no longer out of consensus. In fact, part of the big sell-off in stocks in September reflected growing concern about 3Q earnings. But, as with 2Q results, earnings have been weak but not bad enough to get the kind of drop in 2023 EPS forecasts necessary for the final leg of this bear market. Instead, we think that management teams have/will remain mostly silent on 2023, which means estimates will stay elevated until it becomes obvious just how negative the operating leverage has become and/or companies are forced to discuss 2023 forecasts during 4Q earnings results in January/February. As an aside, falling inflation is the reason why we think margins will disappoint more than investors have modeled. For most of the year we have had pushback against our lower growth call, with investors arguing that higher inflation leads to higher nominal GDP, even in a recession, so earnings can hold up. We disagree because higher inflation leads to higher operating leverage all else equal and operating leverage cuts both ways. As end-price inflation falls faster than costs, operating leverage turns negative. That’s where we are today with PPI above CPI. That means lower lows for the S&P 500 are still ahead after this rally is over.

  Bottom line, inflation has peaked and is likely to fall faster than most expect, based on M2 growth. This could provide some relief to stocks in the short term as rates fall in anticipation of the change. Combining this with the compelling technicals, we think the current rally in the S&P 500 has legs to 4000-4150 before reality sets in on how far 2023 EPS estimates need to come down. We realize that going against one’s core view in the short term can be dangerous (and maybe wrong-headed), but that’s part of our job. It’s like a double-breaking putt in golf – hard to make, but you still gotta try.

  More in the full note available to pro subs at the usual place.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 16:00

• Job Cuts At Elon Musk's Twitter Are Officially On Their Way
  Job Cuts At Elon Musk’s Twitter Are Officially On Their Way

  In news that should come as absolutely zero surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the last week, the Elon Musk era at Twitter has begun. And, Musk’s first order of business as “Chief Twit” at the company? Layoffs. Lots of them.

  After closing on the deal for Twitter on Thursday last week, Musk has wasted no time in starting to cut the fat off the company. After immediately cutting schlep rock CEO Parag Agrawal and head censor Vijaya Gadde from the company, Musk is slated to continue making layoffs this week, according to the New York Times. After arriving at Twitter on Thursday, Musk also fired the company’s CFO.

  According to the Times, managers are “being asked to draw up lists of employees to cut” on Musk’s orders. Twitter currently has about 7,500 employees and the scale of cuts in their entirety is not yet known, the report says.

  

  Layoffs are expected to take place before November 1, the report says. This is the date that “employees were scheduled to receive stock grants as part of their compensation”.

  Musk can avoid paying out the grants by laying off workers before the end of the month, the report says.

  “I was told to expect somewhere around 50 percent of people will be laid off,” Ross Gerber, the chief executive of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management told the New York Times.

  Recall, we pointed out on Thursday that media (for example, Bloomberg) was running rife, citing no sources at all, while claiming that advertisers are nervous of the nazi, child porn and hate-speech that will inevitably return to the social media platform now that the richest man in the world is in charge. The Wall Street Journal also warned that “Madison Avenue isn’t sold on the deal,” suggesting advertisers are anxious to be on the Musk-owned platform.

  Elon Musk then tweeted a brief letter to advertisers, assuring them that “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 15:30

• The Military-Industrial Media Complex Strikes Again
  The Military-Industrial Media Complex Strikes Again

  Authored by Eve Ottenberg via CounterPunch.org,

  Tens of thousands protested against the skyrocketing cost of living and against Macron in France October 16, led by left-wing politician Jean Luc Melenchon, but there were few front page or top-of-the hour headlines in the U.S. Huge protests occurred in Rome the same day to demand an end to Italy’s involvement in NATO, but no coverage on the west side of the Atlantic. Thousands protesting in Paris October 22 against NATO, but little notice in North America. Massive protests against NATO and inflation due to sanctions on Russian energy in France, Germany and Austria in September, but little news of it here in the heart of the empire. German police beat citizens protesting energy shortages and record-high inflation, both due to Russia sanctions, the week of October 17, but that was not covered in the USA. Seventy thousand Czechs protested in Prague September 3 against NATO involvement in Ukraine, demanding gas from Russia (before some mysterious imperial somebody with means and motive blew up Nordstream 1 and 2, probably to nip the political effects of those protests in the bud) and ending the war, but that got little coverage in U.S. corporate media.

  

  Ever get the sense there are things our media hides from us? Hmm. Ever wonder why enormous protests against the policies of the Exceptional Empire and its attack dog, NATO, seem, um, to be downplayed? Ever think our corporate news outlets behave more like the propaganda arm of our neoconservative state department and military than a free press? Well, if so, you may be onto something.

  Lots of Europeans are unhappy about NATO, the Ukraine war, sanctions on Russia and the wild inflation and deindustrialization – which will result in gargantuan unemployment – those sanctions caused. As their living standards sink like stones, Europeans know who is to blame, namely their supposedly great ally across the Atlantic, and many have soured on their so-called alliance with the hegemon. But Washington doesn’t seem to care. Let the Europeans go broke and protest. The important thing is not reporting this news to the American people, who, if they heard about it, might get a subversive inkling that their government had not behaved in an entirely honorable manner.

  Meanwhile lies swarm everywhere. Some unintentional, others not. Most recently we have U.S. joint chiefs of staff chairman Mark Milley claiming that if Ukraine falls, the current world order will collapse. Sadly, this is hogwash. What will collapse are the tumescent egos of U.S. and European politicos and military men. Not surprisingly, they conflate that with the world order. But there are other, far more sinister reasons to make such garishly incendiary pronouncements, namely to prepare the American population for the unthinkable – and it is unthinkable, because if the U.S. attacks Russia with nukes, both the U.S. and Russia will be annihilated. Will Biden and his generals get a nuclear war? Unclear. But what’s clear as day is that Americans travel like lemmings to their doom, thanks to the fibs of their rulers and media.

  Somehow all the big news gets blacked out. Like China dumping $100 billion worth of U.S. treasuries and what that means if this becomes a trend (I’ll tell you what it means: we’re $30 trillion in debt and we can’t pay, so when we cart SUVs full of cash to the supermarket, we’ll make those Weimar wheelbarrows look petite). Or how sanctions on Russian energy backfired and caused ruinous inflation in Europe, pretty awful inflation here in the U.S. and pushed the whole west toward recession…or maybe ultimately depression. Or how Biden’s ever more reckless sanctions on China could wind up bankrupting us all. China is, after all the chief U.S. trading partner. Sanction China, as Biden recently did to its chip and semiconductor sector, and prices for everything explode upwards.

  But money isn’t everything. What about Biden’s devil-may-care attitude toward continued human life on this planet, which he endangers every time he opens his mouth to bloviate that the U.S. will throw its military into the fray, should Taiwan and China go to war? True, Biden’s bellicose pronunciamentos do make the news – he is, after all, the ruler of one of the most violent empires in human history – but details of their global life-and-death implications, namely that they could kill us all? Not so much.

  No, this news is not of interest to the editorial bigwigs who tell us what to think. They’re too busy stuffing our heads with bubble gum for the brain like rubbish about Tik Tok, or celebrity drivel or anything else deeply stupid enough to cretinize viewers and readers, so they won’t notice that their utility bills doubled in recent months, or their grocery bills shot up many percentage points, or the world is closer to being incinerated in a nuclear apocalypse than it has ever been.

  But they notice anyway. And even though they may lack the finely tuned mental framework to fit it all together, thanks to their news consumption habits, lots of people have begun to glimpse that Washington’s idiocy could get them blown up tout de suite and meanwhile is bleeding them dry and will very soon be bleeding them drier. Hence the public’s growing reluctance to keep handing Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, blank checks. The GOP even climbed onto the bandwagon and announced it won’t fund this misbegotten war if it regains congress. I, for one, will be astonished if Republicans have the backbone to keep that promise. Anyway, Biden plans to preempt this oath by forking over more billions to Kiev now. This will not, ahem, help the Dems, which is probably what Republicans count on. But then Biden gets to look like he’s a man of principle (the show must go on), while the rest of us go broke and calculate our distance from atomic ground zero. Americans struggle with utility bills, grocery and gas prices, medical and educational debt. They don’t need to fund defense contractors to the tune of billions of dollars so Ukrainians and Russians can kill each other halfway around the world. And they certainly don’t need a war that has humanity teetering on the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

  In an unexpected dribble of good news, on October 24 the Washington Post reported that some 30 members of the progressive caucus urged Biden to get diplomacy to end the war rolling. The next day, they sniveled and recanted. This was the first time any Dems had the guts not to cheerlead for more bloodshed and more war on Moscow. What caused this initial sea change, I don’t know. But it was good news. Better late than never, it seemed. It appeared to mean some on the so-called left in Washington had finally come to their senses and just might not behave as disgracefully as so many European socialists did once World War I started, when they abandoned their erstwhile pacifism. For a long time, honestly, it has looked like that was the inheritance Dem progressives wanted to claim, an inheritance not just of shame and mass murder, but, were the Ukraine war to morph into World War III, human extinction.

  For less than a day the sun of reason and goodness shone down. Briefly, the people who consider themselves of the left decided this danger of humanity’s mass execution was worth speaking out about and that diplomacy for peace is the only sane route out of the fiasco. But then, the next day they chickened out of bucking their party’s bloodlust. Even their timid gesture was too much to ask. These people are not leftists. They are cowards. They are a disgrace to the left. If anyone in the progressive caucus ever speaks out for diplomacy again, I’ll be very impressed.

  Speaking of being impressed, how about that Washington Post actually playing this story big, about progressives calling for diplomacy, instead of burying it? That was unexpected, to say the least. Because it’s long been sickeningly obvious that our mainstream media show one side of the story: the NATO, Washington, imperial, war-mongering side. And it’s been doing that, shamelessly, for a generation. (It did that earlier too, but with a bit of actual embarrassment, whenever it got called out.) Remember Iraq’s infamous weapons of mass destruction? The editors who hyped that lie for months on end went on to bigger and better things, and so did the politicians – Biden even became president! – while an entire country, Iraq, was bombed to smithereens, based largely on mendacious reporting and political chicanery and now, decades later, has simply swirled down the drain.

  And who can forget the frenzy whipped up to justify NATO’s criminal 1999 bombing of Serbia? Nowadays Biden and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg would have you believe NATO is a “defensive” organization. What it did to Serbia should have tossed that mistake in the trash long ago. Instead, the error persists (not accidentally). When Russia reacted to the chance of Ukraine joining NATO and thus the presence of a hostile bomb-happy axis on its borders, western rulers protested that NATO is “defensive.” So also clamor our media, prevaricating just as they do every time they mention the U.S. defense department, which should ditch that moniker and return to the previous, more honest “war department.”

  You know things are bad when absurd chuckleheads like former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi are the ones almost nailing reality on the head. He did that October 20 with his remarks that Ukraine provoked Russia into its invasion. It could be argued that Kiev did so by slaughtering 14,000 Russian-speakers in the Donbass since 2014 and then, last winter, massing huge numbers of troops on that region’s border, in preparation for what Moscow took to be a genocide. But actually, Ukraine’s supposed instigation had lotsa help. It would have been more accurate for Berlusconi to say that Ukraine’s puppet master, the U.S., provoked Moscow with its nonstop incitement by expanding NATO eastward since the Soviet Union’s fall, as numerous American experts and diplomats – from cold war brain-trust luminary George Kennan to former ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock to CIA chief William Burns to great powers expert John Mearsheimer, and others – had  warned, and more recently egged Moscow to attack with a 2014 Kiev coup and the eight years of violent nonsense that followed, and that Washington did so with premeditation to rupture the economic relationship between Russia and Europe; but nonetheless Berlusconi landed his verbal dart on the board with the bullseye. And when you have to go to Berlusconi for informed commentary, you’re in trouble, because he recently chose his side in the Italian government and it was the fascist one. So now things are so bad that fascists are among the people objecting to imperial propaganda. Fun times.

  But we have the same disastrous mess here in the U.S., where the next presidential election could shape up to be a choice between Trump’s fascism or Biden’s nuclear war. Choice? Ho, ho. That’s no choice. That’s death on the installment plan or instant death. Either way it’s disastrous for ordinary people, because Trumpism either ends what civilization we have in America, which has a dire, global because imperial impact, or Bidenism directly ends civilization on earth.

  At the start of the Ukraine war, Biden promised not to launch World War III. He broke that promise, by flooding Ukraine with weapons, CIA operatives and some special forces. To call this reckless is an understatement. Biden’s refusal to use his considerable weight to promote peace negotiations killed thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, will likely kill many more, and also endangers the lives of billions of other people, worldwide – 5.3 billion from nuclear-winter-induced starvation, who would suffer a slow, agonizing death. And I’m not talking about the canard that Russia may use a low-yield nuclear device on the battlefield. I’m talking about Moscow and Washington determining that they really are in a hot war and the long-range, high-yield nuclear missiles that could then begin to fly.

  Biden’s sole task is to prevent this. His desire to be seen as the new FDR, as a friend of the unions, as some sort of social democrat, mean nothing if he can’t deescalate this war with Moscow. If Biden wants any legacy other than that of earth’s destroyer, leaving humanity a cold, charred, radioactive planet, he will stop his war-mongering garbage at once and throw his definitive, presidential heft behind peace negotiations with Moscow. And Washington must be an in-person party to those negotiations. Absent that, anything else he does goes down in history, if there even is a history, as a waste.

  Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Hope Deferred. She can be reached at her website.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 10/30/2022 – 15:00

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