Debt Rattle September 9 2023

René Magritte The Art of Conversation 1963

I knew that was a Magritte the instant I layed eyes upon it…
The Art of Conversation; wonderful…made my day, it did………..

Picture of the author at work.

And to be useful. Wealth to a Haitian. Or an American, poor as they are now.

Lying by omission
Among the biggest failings of modern media is a growing inability to check a story. In large part, this is simply because the modern multi-media landscape is so competitive that only a handful of media giants are able to employ sub-editors to check stories before they are published. The result is that most of what we are fed as “news” is merely a re-hashing of corporate press releases designed to put a positive spin on the corporations behind them. In these circumstances, it is incumbent on those media organisations which can still afford to employ journalists and sub-editors to at least do some basic checking before publishing a story. But that’s not how the media environment is configured these days.

So it is that the once-trusted (and increasingly despised) propagandists at Pravda provide “the party line” rather than the news. And the party line on matters economic here in the UK is that the only news must be good news. So it is that Noor Nanji, who purports to be a “business reporter,” tells us that:

“Retail sales rose in August as customers ‘splurged on self-care’, new figures suggest. Sales of non-food items had their best month since February, helped by higher spending on health and beauty…

“Taken as a whole, the value of retail sales increased by 4.1% in August, compared to a year earlier…”

To the casual reader, this sounds like some good economic news in what has otherwise been a difficult couple of years… except for that one word – value. Since I am not a casual reader the word “value” appeared like a red flashing light (prompting me to write this critique). Because if the value of sales had risen by four percent at a time when inflation is running at nearly seven percent, the real story was that people are buying less but paying more for it… something a publicly funded and supposedly impartial news outlet ought to have made clear at the start.

Nor can the folks at the BBC blame time pressure or staff shortages for merely parroting the British Retail Consortium’s press release, since it begins with this qualification:

“Sales figures are not adjusted for inflation. Given that both the August SPI (BRC) and July CPI (ONS) show inflation running at higher than normal levels, the rise in sales masked a likely drop in volumes once inflation is accounted for.”

It used to be that reputable news outlets would never publish on the basis of a single source. On an economic story like this, a second source would be expected to be an economist or statistician who would have spotted and been able to correct the discrepancy between sales volumes and sales values. And fair reporting would have put this in the second paragraph. Instead, the BBC manages a slight corrective from Esme Harwood at Barclaycard, pointing to a 1.2 percent fall in credit and debit card spending in August… and even this is at the end of the story, where many readers will not have bothered looking.

One can understand why a broadcaster which relies increasingly on not upsetting the government to the point that it abolishes the license fee entirely, would not want to cast the economy in a negative light. After all, its misreporting of petrol queues in September 2021 led to a nationwide fuel panic. They probably wouldn’t want to be seen as the cause of a recession in 2023. But this is only swapping short-term advantage for long-term trust, because the experience of the majority living in ex-industrial, rundown-seaside, and small-town rural Britain is a world away from the narrative that the BBC would have us believe.

Half-a-century ago, when the BBC was the most reliable of a tiny number of news outlets, they might have been able to get away with this (although, ironically, they would have run a thorough critique back then). But in an age of mass multi-media, there are too many alternative sources – particularly those documenting British life beyond the gated communities where the salaried class – including BBC managers – have retreated.

In any case, the British economy is in dire straits, with stagflation looming. UK retail has yet to recover from the battering it took during lockdown. And with most people now making economies in the face of stubbornly high inflation, happy-clappy retail stories simply jar against most people’s lived experience. Indeed, in a sense, August’s actually poor retail figures may well be as good as it gets, as some 1.4 million mortgages along with thousands of lockdown business loans have to be rolled over from an interest rate of 1.5 percent to more than 6 percent between now and next summer. Indeed, if I was a gambler, I would put money on both retail volumes and retail values being down considerably by August 2024.

Punishing ourselves
Britain’s shit-spreading water companies are back in the news this week, as it turns out they have been quietly pumping shit onto our beaches just as holiday makers head for the coast to make the best of what has been an almost absent summer, despite the lack of heavy rainfall which is the usual justification for allowing shit to enter the storm drain system.

The news has been met with the usual round of pearl-clutching and something-must-be-done-ing from politicians, regulators and the salaried classes. But the truth is that nothing will be done, because nobody has an incentive to do anything meaningful. At best, the water companies will be fined, and the cost of paying the fines will be added onto customers’ bills. And since water is what economists refer to as an “inelastic” commodity, boycotting is not an option.

The problem runs much deeper though, and is a design feature (not a bug) in the neoliberal quasi-market structure used to flog off the water infrastructure to the highest bidder back in 1989. As with all of our critical infrastructure, regulators and newly privatised companies were set several not necessarily aligning objectives. In the case of water, these included:

Improving and cleaning up the UK’s antiquated water and sewage infrastructure,
Conforming to EU environmental regulations on river and sea water cleanliness,
Building resilience to avoid a repeat of the 1976 drought,
Flood management,
Maintaining low prices for consumers,
Maximising profits to shareholders.
A quasi-independent regulator was required because each water company has a de-facto monopoly in the area where it operates. A disgruntled Thames Water customer, for example, could not choose instead to purchase water from the publicly owned Scottish Water or the non-profit Welsh Water. This though, gave rise to a possible unforeseen but definitely understated conflict of interest. While the ministerial appointees charged with overseeing the activities of the regulator may have been relatively diverse, the mangers and employees couldn’t be because they had to come from the industry they were regulating. So that the regulatory bodies were populated with people whose informal interest was in securing a career path within the industry.

Ministers – from all of the mainstream neoliberal parties – meanwhile, had no desire to have to step in and manage – still less renationalise – the utility companies. And so, having ministers and regulators do no more than mouth words before handing out fines to water customers has become the way of handling stories like today’s for the best part of 34 years… the result being that the UK still has droughts and floods, water mains across the country still burst, water security is worse now than it was in 1989, water companies continue to dump shit in the rivers and seas, and the only winners are the shareholders who walked away with a cool £52bn.

Given what lies ahead of us as the economy shrinks, the renationalisation of public utilities is probably inevitable. But in the interim, one potential way of reversing the warped incentives is to change the people who get to pay the fines for breaches of regulations. Instead of fining the companies – and allowing them to pass the fines on to customers – levying fines on the dividends paid to shareholders, the bonuses paid to senior managers, and the pension funds of employees would go a long way to focussing them on all of their objectives.

Hot air
The UK is about to do huge damage to the global net zero project. Under successive governments since the late 1980s, the UK has positioned itself as a world leader in the deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) while rapidly phasing out its old coal power stations. Given the location of the British Isles, in the northeast Atlantic directly in the path of both the jet stream and the gulf stream, if anyone was going to make a success of wind power, it was the UK.

Critics quite rightly point out that this amounts to virtue signalling on a grand scale – the UK produces less than two percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while China has burned more coal in the last two decades than Britain has since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If, critics argue, Great Britain was to sink beneath the North Sea tomorrow, it would have pretty much no effect on climate change.

This is not true once we factor in the carbon emissions released elsewhere to produce the many resources and goods that the UK imports. But the broad point stands – even if the UK could somehow figure out how to run entirely on NRREHTs, it would have no effect on the climate. What it would do, however, is to set a pathway to a renewable energy future for other countries to follow. But this can only happen if the pathway is viable… and the gathering evidence is that it isn’t.

The storage problem has yet to be solved, leaving Britain dependent upon expensive gas along with imported nuclear electricity to plug the gaps when the wind isn’t blowing. The UK hasn’t even begun to figure out how to de-carbonise transport. And three resources essential to the manufacture of NRREHTs – concrete, steel, and plastic – depend upon coal and oil to manufacture, transport, deploy, and maintain. Building wind turbines to generate electricity, it turns out, was the easy bit.

There was though, always an issue with cost. While the wind is, for all practical considerations, both free and permanent, the technology used to capture and focus it is anything but. And the idea that wind turbines are cheap was largely the result of German factories manufacturing them using cheap Russian gas. Indeed, the German wind turbine industry was one of the first casualties of the self-destructive sanctions imposed on Russia. Now that European energy costs have spiralled – accounting for most of the inflation we have been experiencing – the price of NRREHTs has spiralled accordingly.

This is about to throw a big spanner into the workings of the UK’s net zero program, since to have any chance of succeeding, the UK needs to deploy terawatts of new wind and nuclear capacity. As became clear last winter, however, there is an economic ceiling above which the price of electricity cannot rise without causing major economic disruption. And that price turns out to be too low for NRREHTs generators. As Simon Jack at Pravda reported earlier today:

“An upcoming auction for seven UK offshore wind projects is set to flop, according to industry sources. The results are due to be announced on Friday, but the number of bids will be close to zero, or none at all…

“Energy firm SSE and Swedish firm Vattenfall have already ruled themselves out of the bidding, saying that the government had failed to allow for sharp rises in the cost of steel and labour when setting the electricity price.

“Industry sources have told the BBC that if big, experienced and well-financed firms cannot make the sums work, it is unlikely that others will be able to.”

The “Contract for Difference” auctions are supposed to provide the government with a means of setting a maximum price for electricity – balancing the need to keep consumer prices low while ensuring that energy companies remain profitable. Under the CfD process, energy companies bid to build and operate new offshore wind projects in the expectation that they can supply electricity for less than the government price – keeping the difference between the two. But in the event that the price of electricity goes above the government price, the government takes the difference.

The latest auction had a price of £44 per megawatt-hour – far lower than last year’s £128.93 per megawatt-hour average from all sources but reflecting the huge increases in energy prices since 2021. So, it should come as no surprise that none of the energy companies wants to have anything to do with it. The auction failure reinforces the conundrum set out by professor Helm in the government’s 2017 energy review:

“It is not particularly difficult to set out what an efficient energy system might look like which meets the twin objectives of the climate change targets and security of supply. There would, however, remain a binding constraint: the willingness and ability to pay for it. There have to be sufficient resources available, and there has in a democracy to be a majority who are both willing to pay and willing to force the population as a whole to pay. This constraint featured prominently in the last three general elections, and it has not gone away.”

The economic process that we find ourselves in today is a play in two parts. Act one was rising costs – which have been exacerbated by lockdowns and sanctions. In the UK, because of its heavy dependence on imports, these costs continue to rise even as they are slowing elsewhere. And, of course, rising interest rates compound the problem by making the cost of currency itself more expensive. It is Act two – falling incomes – however, which will deliver the killer blow. As demand crashes across the economy, businesses and consumers will no longer have the income needed to sustain expensive construction projects of any kind, whether wind farms, nuclear power stations or high-speed railway lines. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the UK government will be able to raise the tax income it needs if it is to avoid a run on the pound which will exacerbate the crisis by further increasing the cost of imports.

Net zero is going to fail because the UK example is rapidly turning into a dystopian eco-austerity program. The inability to deploy the NRREHTs infrastructure at a price anyone can afford is further proof of this. And as the UK economy crashes and burns, people around the world will draw the obvious conclusion that, whatever else you might do to address climate change FFS don’t follow the British example.

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/09/07/in-brief-lying-by-omission-punishing-ourselves-hot-air/

A successful net zero program.

I use all the energy that I want,
You reduce your energy wants

As Noirette says the Democrat Cĺub has effectively knocked JFK out of the democrat primary race forcing JFK to run as an independent.

The Republican Club hasn’t yet excited Trump from the Republican primary yet but the Democrat Club sure is trying to knock Trump out of the Republican primary race!

Maybe the Republican Club’s plan is to let Trump win the primary race but lose the presidential race again by having Dominion count enough Trump votes as RFK votes with Joe sneaking up the middle again.

As a Canadian, I approve this message!

F.S.

Noirette and Wes. I’ve been wondering about all of that. It looks like Red Queen Hillary still owns the DNC, and asecond Obama Presidency might be just what they have as an ace-in-the-hole.
Clearly Bobby K. Jr. has considered being excluded, and has a plan-b, which he won’t discuss, “I don’t have a plan-b”.
Bobby Jr. politely refers to “President Trump” at times. They are sure not “enemies”.
The “enemies” control microwave beam weapons that kill local children on Maui, and Pfizer gene-therapy products that induce quick death, slow death and infertility. Those “enemies” seem to have a lot to do with the deeply interwoven global ownership/managerial eneterprises like BlackRock, Vanguard, and major central banks. I don’t think this big-exclusive-club is simple to describe. I don’t think they care much about forms of ethnicity, but they know each other as “peers”, somehow.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to out-survive them.
“We” are starting at an initial loss, but have been holding for a year or so, now…
They are starting a new offensive against us on multiple fronts.

Aspnaz, yesterday
We all know that people only behave well when there are checks on their behaviour, feedback that benefits them behave better.

This statement is too exclusionary to be accurate, too over-simplified. Many people behave the way that they were trained to behave as children. As adults, they continue with the conditioning that was laid into them as children, and will only shift and change if life puts enormous pressure on them. Personally, I continued to behave kindly towards my ex husband during the marriage — as I had been trained to treat people kindly, in all circumstances — even when his behavior was atrocious. I did eventually kick him out of the home with an order of protection, but I warned him before I did so that if he drank alcohol one more time that an order of protection would follow. I suppose that he was so accustomed to me putting up with his crap that he didn’t believe me, or he was too mixed up in the head to think it through. I had to learn to set boundaries when dealing with other people, because the boundary setting in the home of my childhood was lax — we were trained to be kind, and kind people are circumspect and harsh boundaries were not required. The benefits from boundary-setting are often delayed — the initial result may be a worsening if the immediate situation.

Humans often behave in accordance with principles and values which exist on a higher level of thought than rats pushing a lever to get food or heroin. This is why although the masses can be strongly influenced by bread, it also takes “circuses” — distractions, ways to befuddle their minds and confuse their thinking.

Pre-patch Vax Halcyon Days of Germany’s Sultry Liver Sausage Chancellor

The deep archeological evidence contains a curious characteristic that seems to accompany all those long gone empires that seem to rise, fall and disappear like some sort of sociological clockwork.. . . big cities.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to many academics that the cities are not any kind of desirable accomplishment but are instead a manifestation underlying disease and symptomatic manifestation or “signals” foreshadowing the collapse and dissolution that is right around the corner. The hundreds or even thousands of years preceding such Great Cities in various regions of the world (that is, the hubs of pathologically centralized wealth, power and control) are the actual society. The “advancements (not!) found in cities are mere evidence of Mass Formation Psychosis that thinks its a GREAT idea to kill children for “profit” or worship power and money above ALL other goals and values.

So who lives in cities? Pretty much everybody who sincerely believes that the “perks” of city life (like money, snazzier clothing and easy access to drugs and hookers are worth the extremely high price, such as living in close proximity to filth, ugliness, crime, perversions of all sorts, and ruler who enforce tighter and tighter and tighter control (as they sense their failing grip on power).

And who lives OUTSIDE the cities? All the folks who just won’t put up with that kind of shit.

As the insane forces of centralized brutal control draw their wagons into every tightening circles they eventually contract into non existence when NOBODY is putting up with that shit anymore. Sometimes the peasants burn it all down, sometimes the empire next door sets up shop for awhile until its their turn to disappear, and sometimes the local human society just take it apart stone-by-stone to build barns and houses and stuff that are more useful to their actual lives.

You can only herd sheep up to certain (but hard to precisely forecast) point, beyond which there are just too damn many sheep for too few shepherds and then, Blammo! The sheep who are for distant from the reach of the dying cities just go back to doing what they wanted to do all along, and the shrinking minority of ex-shepherds are forced back to having their would-be livestock ignoring them (or hanging them from lamp posts, depending upon local attitudes and conditions.

I just hope no one interrupts Act III with an A-Bomb. That could REALLY slow down the recycling process.

So the Governor of New Mexico has attempted to personally cancel the US Constitution by declaring guns illegal to carry in HER state’s biggest city, Albuquerque. Aside from being illegal nonsense her solution to gun crime is amusing for the fact that anyone abiding and cowardly enough to actually comply with her executive order was not really much of a threat to anyone in the first place. I mean, what’s even the point of having a personal defense weapon if not having got the balls to use the weapon to defend oneself?

As for those guys who defy the order, however, well they might be a significantly different matter. I would advise not trying to take their gun away if not up for a gun fight.

@Oroboros
That motorcycle sculpture made my day. What is in the world depends on how you see the world.

(is there an existing medical term for a shot to make you less resistant to a disease?)

Market Ticker guy snagged a great paper, not yet peer reviewed:

“Our analysis revealed inconsistencies between the subject data listed in the 6-Month Interim Report and publications authored by Pfizer/BioNTech trial site administrators. Most importantly, we found evidence of an over 3.7-fold increase in number of deaths due to cardiovascular events in BNT162b2 vaccinated subjects compared to Placebo controls. This significant adverse event signal was not reported by Pfizer/BioNTech. Potential sources of these data inconsistencies are identified.”

Heads will roll.

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202309.0131/v1

more charts…

Fauci is too busy to read and keep up to date. ” there’s other studies saying different.”

https://www.g20.org/content/dam/gtwenty/gtwenty_new/document/G20-New-Delhi-Leaders-Declaration.pdf

G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration

Working For Yourself https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/working-for-yourself

The “Uniparty” imperial courtiers in Washington DC, London and Brussels manage the investment properties (“world”) for the global owners. The owners hide their identities through management companies like BlackRock and Vanguard, and the central banks of the world. They all own stock in each other’s companies, so they share investment interests while remaining invisible as individuals and families. “Owning everything” is the basic strategy, and when business losses are to be imposed, they are to be imposed upon smaller companies and businesses outside of this global networks. That it straightforward, and it has worked well since 1990, while there wa a “unipolar world” the the western US/NATO empire holding persuasive force, enough to ruin Iraq, Libya, Syria, and to block central asian cooperation by making Afghanistan a war zone, bleeding heroin and violence into Iran, Russia and China.

Those days of easy-management of the global properties have ended, but there is no restructuring yet. Doubling down on threats has turned into the kinds of defeat that weaken the threats, so that more countries are emboldened to pursue national interests, rather than be bled of their natural resources by globalist neo-colonialism.

The colonized periphery is pulling away, and the colonization is retreating into Europe and to the streets of the United States, where the squeeze that was put on the Greeks to save German and French banks is now being put on German and French, Italian, Belgian, Spanish, etc. citizens and businesses. This self-digestion cannot persist very long. The maximum value was already being extracted from the productive parts of western economies. More extraction is rapidly shrinking European economies, and the cutoff of inexpensive fuel and feedstocks has just put a lot of them out of business. There is no “recovery” possible in this context, not under the same management protocols.

The rest of the world continues to reorganize trade incrementally, outside of the $US currency regime, bypassing that value-extraction arrangement. The rest of the world does not want to spook the declining and unstable empire, still armed with weapons of total-annihilation. The rest of the world is still paying tribute, but is looking forward to not paying tribute when that can be safely arranged. Argentina just joined BRICS (official 1/1/2024). Argentina owes a lot of $US denominated debt, but it is mostly held by local Argentine elite families. Hmmm, those families have interests which sharply diverge from the rest of Argentine citizens, don’t they. Elections are coming up. The local Argentine elites will do whatever they can to maintain their ownership positions. This reflects neocolonialist mechanisms in other countries, also. Local financial elites need the military and financial threats available from the rest of the $US denominated empire to sustain their local positions of power, ownership and value-extraction. BRICS+ threatens their prerogatives.
This winter and this coming year are set for continual incremental weakening of $US based ownership and control status in the world. The direction is for national interests to gather the wealth at home, rather than to export cheap commodities to be processed for additional value in industrialized countries. No sudden, threatening moves, though.

In the US/NATO/EU/Israel/5-Eyes countries, the interwoven courtiers and deep-states are all slowly sinking together. None is able to take initiative against the consensus, which is to pretend that the “unipolar world” is “still” the thing that it never quite became during the Bush/Cheney global war on brown people in oil countries.
The US particularly faces an election cycle which can’t be convincingly faked to obtain an arranged outcome, as the Hillary Clinton election almost was, and the Joe Biden election decisively was. There is increasing chaos and disorder as bad political-economic managers in the collective west are increasingly desperate and open in their non-democratic criminal actions to maintain their positions of power and immunity from the consequences of their actions. This holds the productive and other members of society hostage and extracts the value of their work, while saddling them with unpayable debts.

The globalist owners know that they also face a loss of income, and even of some of their ownership, while these managers continue in power, but what are the alternatives for the owners? They are collectively like the monkey holding onto sweet rice inside a coconut with a hole too small to let the grasping fist out, trapped until they let go…

​ BREAKING NEWS: Obama insider and author and biographer Joel Gilbert has claimed Michelle Obama is preparing to enter the 2024 race and become the Democratic presidential nominee allegedly due to Biden’s declining health.​ (​a fourth term for Barack Obama)
https://twitter.com/dom_lucre/status/1700201573392019469

​ Jim Kunstler, A Theory of the Game:
​ Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss was a bigger shock to the Washington DC deep state Blob than Donald Trump’s victory… In the group madness provoked by Hillary Clinton’s loss, the dirty secret was that she had actually bought the Democratic National Committee in 2016, meaning the machinery that runs the party. She used lavish contributions to the Clinton Foundation to accomplish that. And Hillary along with her foundation — and husband Bill, who had been reduced by late career misadventure to a kind of political fashion accessory — had committed any number of grave crimes against our country over the years, especially during her service as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. Think: Skolkovo… Uranium One…. In 2016 Hillary used her ownership of the DNC to underhandedly de-rail the likely Democratic primary winner, Bernie Sanders, from being nominated.​..
​..And who was Barack Obama exactly? Good question. This mysterious figure who rose so swiftly from being, briefly, a mere state senator in Illinois, then to the US Senate — for only a few years, accomplishing next to nothing there — then to being nominated for president, and actually winning the 2008 election! …
..Mr. Obama was liberalism’s wish-fulfillment: a half-century after the Civil Rights movement, America elects the first black president (half-black, anyway)! Liberalism needed, above all, a sense of moral superiority, to heal an imperfect world, to be ahead-of-the-curve in mankind’s implacable march of progress toward perfection, and especially to set an example for how to live for all those gun-loving, bible-thumping, meth-smoking, opiate-scarfing, racist, rapist flyover rubes who would dare to vote for such misogynistic vermin as the TV-clown Donald J. Trump…
..To what degree was Mr. Obama a tool of other forces lurking in the deep background of world politics, and what are these forces? Many of the non-Left will say they are a loose consortium of corporate and financial actors desperate to keep in motion a set of rackets that magically stabilize business-as-usual, which asset-strips the remaining wealth of the middle classes and transfers it to the already super-wealthy…
​ “Joe Biden” was Mr. Obama’s device for wresting control of the DNC from Hillary Clinton’s gang. But now “Joe Biden” has criminal problems of his own that threaten to take down not only his own presidency, but of everything connected to it, namely his controller, Mr. Obama & Company, and the Democratic Liberal order itself driven insane by its own criminality. Meanwhile, his nemesis, Donald Trump has proven to be extraordinarily resilient in the remorseless war against him. And now that has culminated in the (so far) four cockamamie criminal cases cooked up by Obama / “Biden” as the final line of defense against the Golden Golem of Greatness — who obviously has no intention of surrendering.
It looks like Mr. Obama is now in the process of being “outed” as something other than the suave performer he was for two terms in the White House. The Tucker Carlson interview with one Larry Sinclair, a gay cruiser and druggie who claims to have frolicked with Mr. Obama before he was a celebrity, was met with ominous silence in the mainstream media. They didn’t even dare denounce it to avoid drawing more attention to it. And the mysterious “drowning” of the Obama family’s chef, Tafari Campbell, paddleboarding at night in the shallow bay off the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, remains woefully under-investigated. Will Barack Obama and “Joe Biden” end up sinking each other and the Democratic Party with them? And then, will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be called in to rescue the darn thing while driving all the demons out of it?​ [Naw Jim, they’ll just nominate Michelle Obama and fight to somebody’s death.]

A Theory of the Game

As per Wayne’s World, “Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt!” The uniparty has policies and procedures by which it “operates”.
Biden Impeachment Vote Could Take Place in Mid-September – US Lawmaker
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230908/biden-impeachment-vote-could-take-place-in-mid-september—us-lawmaker-1113195537.html

​ MK Bhadrakumar , The Ankara-Moscow relationship challenges western expectations: Here is a unique model of cooperation among regional powers, built on mutual interests, respect, and the recognition of each country’s independent foreign policies and strategic autonomy.
​ In the full flush of his election victory, Erdogan made certain efforts to mend fences with the west, signaling a willingness to agree to Sweden’s induction into NATO and showing solidarity with Ukraine. In moves that could seriously upset Moscow, Ankara wantonly released Azov commanders who were captured by Russia in Mariupol last year and announced an intent to jointly produce weaponry with Ukraine.
​ Nonetheless, Moscow reacted cautiously. The Kremlin could afford to mark time since this is also an asymmetrical relationship where Russia holds the upper hand. Moscow could sense that Erdogan was not really “pivoting” to the west, but was rather showing an interest in improving western ties which had soured in recent years -and its outcome remains far from certain.​..​
​..Basically, Russia’s relations with Turkiye are fortified by the warm personal equations between Putin and Erdogan, and both leaders are consummate realists with shared interests and a keenness to challenge Western dominance in regional politics…
The “body language” of the meeting in Sochi confirmed that there is no change in the verve of the personal relationship between the two leaders. Television footage showed the two men smiling and shaking hands upon Erdogan’s arrival at Putin’s residence, where the Russian president suggested that his guest take a vacation in the Black Sea resort.
​ In his opening remarks, Putin put Erdogan at ease by reassuring him upfront that the Russian offer to create a global “energy hub” in Turkiye is very much in the cards and will materialize soon.
​ However, the icing on the cake is the proposed agreement that would facilitate free exports of grain from Russia to six African nations with the help of Turkiye and Qatar. In Erdogan’s presence, Putin announced:
​ “We are close to completing agreements with six African states, where we intend to supply foodstuffs for free and even carry out delivery and logistics for free. Deliveries will begin in the next couple of weeks.”
​ The political and geopolitical resonance of this decision in Africa is simply immeasurable — Russia is offering, on the one hand, the Wagner Group as gatekeepers, and on the other hand, food security for the continent. In one fell swoop, western propaganda was trashed, with some help from Ankara.
​ Erdogan, on his part, expressed confidence that Russia would “soon” revive the Black Sea grain deal, while also echoing Putin’s stance that the west had betrayed its deal commitments with Russia. Equally, he distanced Ankara from rival western plans to send grain across the Black Sea – which now becomes a non-starter. As he put it:
​ “The alternative proposals brought to the agenda could not offer a sustainable, secure and permanent model based on cooperation between the parties like the Black Sea Initiative.”​ …
..Putin voiced satisfaction that he and Erdogan have raised the relations to a “very good, high level.” Interestingly, Putin singled out the construction of the Akkuyu nuclear power plant – Turkiye’s first, built by the Russians – which will be fully operational next year, as he described Turkiye as a new member of the “international nuclear club.”
​ These are measured words, no doubt. The message out of the Sochi talks is that Russian-Turkish relations have gained maturity. The summit followed last week’s talks between Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in Moscow.
​ Later, in the presence of Fidan, Lavrov spoke at some length and with extraordinary clarity about Russia’s policies towards Turkiye. The salience lies in Russia’s profound appreciation of Tukiye’s independent foreign policy, “which is geared towards its own national interests,” resisting Western pressure.
​ Lavrov said Turkiye’s “constructive and equitable interaction” with Russia is not only mutually beneficial economically and advantageous, but also strengthens “the sovereign basis” of Turkiye’s foreign policy. Lavrov expressed the hope that Turkiye “will continue to respond with reciprocity despite pressure from the United States and its allies who seek to pit everyone against the Russian Federation,” concluding:
​ “The effectiveness of our policy dialogue and economic cooperation will continue to depend on mutual willingness to consider each other’s concerns and interests and to seek to balance them. Our Turkish partners possess the necessary strategic vision. We will continue to adhere to approaches based on mutual respect and a balance of interests.”
​ Evidently, Lavrov spoke with great deliberation and purpose. What emerges is that although NATO-member Turkiye has not yet sought membership in the expanded BRICS or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) — unlike Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Egypt — Russia nonetheless gives pivotal importance to Turkiye given its strategic autonomy, which is both a game changer in regional politics and a trendsetter.​..
..As Lavrov stated recently, Russia is willing to cooperate with any country that treasures its independence.
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/the-unshakeable-putin-erdogan-nexus

​Gilbert Doctorow explains that NATO countries are barely in compliance with their commitments to mutual defense and will be out of compliance if they donate F-16s and such.
Why Belgium is not sending F-16s to Ukraine

Why Belgium is not sending F-16s to Ukraine

​ Recent Ukrainian attacks in against the villages of Rabotino and Verbovoe will only lead to further attrition of Kiev’s forces, Scott Ritter, former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector, told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.​
“Russia always had a primarily defensive doctrine inherited from the Soviet times. But this new defensive doctrine that’s being implemented, especially in the Zaporozhye front, is the brainchild of Lieutenant General Alexander Romanchuck, former deputy commander, I believe, of the 58th Combined Arms Army. He was sent to the Combined Arms Academy after participating in the early phases of the Special Military Operation. While he was at the Combined Arms Academy, he rewrote Russian defensive doctrine and then he was brought out of the Combined Arms Academy and given a leadership position in the Zapporozhye front in the Rabotino area.
“In accordance with the doctrine, “the purpose of the forward defensive zone is to receive an enemy attack to help break it up, to use defensive belts, minefields, obstacles, what they call, ‘fire cauldrons’ or ‘sacks’ where you want to force the enemy to come in so you can hit them with artillery, to break up the attack, but not to hold and die,” explained Ritter…
..Exhausted by struggling to overcome Russia’s defense lines, the Ukrainians will have no strength left to push on forward, said Ritter. “This is part of Alexander Romanchuck’s defensive concept, and it’s been executed perfectly by the Russians at Rabotino,” he stressed…
..While Ukraine’s objectives include the physical reconquest of territory Ukraine believes belongs to it, NATO’s goal is not so much about achieving decisive military victory on the battlefield, but to inflict pain on Russia to an extent that there could be a “Moscow Maidan”, akin to one that happened in Kiev in 2014, Ritter explained…
..”The answer is, NATO itself has a paper tiger that for the last 20 years has not been funded properly. They haven’t been training properly. They’ve not been doing the right kind of defense procurement properly. And there’s not a single military today that’s healthy enough to carry out the kind of combat that’s taking place in Ukraine, let alone transfer equipment to the Ukrainian military that could assist them in doing this kind of warfare.”
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230908/scott-ritter-ukrainian-counteroffensives-last-desperate-push-1113205046.html

​ US media reported on Thursday that the Pentagon had postponed testing of its Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) a day prior, based on “pre-flight checks.” The test was to take place in Florida, with the weapon fired eastward into the Atlantic Ocean.​..
​..This, Drozdenko noted, was a key difference between reentry vehicles and hypersonic weapons: they have to be controlled and maneuvered, not just allowed to “ram the atmosphere with their belly” until they slow down.
“The task of hypersonic weapons like Avangard is to maneuver. This is the most important thing, so that air defense systems can neither detect it nor shoot it down. It needs a control system that can somehow analyze the external environment despite being in this plasma cloud. There is a whole complex of fundamental theoretical sciences – materials science, aerodynamics of high speeds – which current control systems and radio electronics do not have. This is a huge barrier.”​ ..
..“And now we actually have just three types of weapons: the glider, Avangard, which has already been repeatedly tested; we have the Kinzhal missile with a rocket engine; and Zircon, a sea-based rocket that works with a ramjet engine that is a further development of the Onyx missile.”​ [and rubbing it in…]
​ “Part of these technologies was received by India in the process of joint development of the Brahmos missile. That is why the Americans fail: because a good part of humanity does not want to share technology with [them]. They didn’t manage to steal from them themselves, until they fully developed it.”
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230907/huge-barriers-pentagons-hypersonic-woes-due-to-very-delicate-physics-problems-behind-tech-1113187726.html

The whole point of democracy and free markets is to force competition on elites who are desperate to eliminate competition.

What’s the point of discussing reforms that aren’t even possible in the current status quo? That’s a good question, as any discussion of major systemic changes can be dismissed as pointless (since they’ll never be adopted), and a distraction from the “real work” that can be managed within the current system.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept23/reinventing-democracy9-23.html