The legislature in the Great State of Florida passed legislation that bans lab-grown meat and governor DeSantis just signed it into law. In under 24 hours, with the ink on the bill not dry yet, the whole Expert™ class published long walls of text explaining to us, mere mortals, why Florida is wrong. Scientific American called it evidence free. While the BBC titled the story as Ron DeSantis bans ‘global elite’ lab-grown meat – misleadingly suggesting that this is somehow DeSantis’ idea (it’s not), that Florida is somehow unique in this endeavor (it’s not) and that such a policy is the purview of conspiracist loons with fantasies about a global elite (it’s not). Oh, and let’s not forget the usual gaslighting – Why Florida banned a kind of meat that doesn’t really exist (If it doesn’t exist and it’s not happening, then why are you upset?). This reminds us about the bans on pornographic material in schools also passed by Florida legislature. We were told it’s silly because pornography doesn’t exist in public schools. As it turned out, it did exist. The same is true here: Lab-grown meat in fact does exist and is already being sold in the United States.

But the most important dynamic can be observed on Twitter X, where all of the techno-optimist shills influential accounts have nearly the same message. In fact three messages:

• right wingers are bad because they’re not techno-optimists
• right wingers are just like leftists because they ban stuff
• right wingers have been bribed by Big Meat to pass a protectionist measure

The first two are utterly ridiculous because being a techno-optimist is not some universally understood moral good (quite the opposite, I would argue) and banning stuff doesn’t make one a leftist. As Milton Friedman was saying – to see if an idea holds water, take it to the limits. So, if banning stuff makes one a leftist, does that mean we shouldn’t be banning murder? If yes, then maybe being a leftist isn’t a bad thing. If banning murder doesn’t make one a leftist, then maybe banning stuff isn’t in and of itself a leftist position.

The third message of the big accounts on X is the classical conspiracism that’s fashionable in pseudo-elite circles. You see, the people who hate you don’t think you actually hold the policy positions you say you hold, even if you live them out and lead by example. In their mind, you, the pleb, are merely manipulated or straight-up bought-off by moneyed interests that happen to be in competition with them. So, in this case, people who support the lab meat ban are simply hunters or farmers who bought-off the politicians to protect their own interests.

The beauty of Twitter X, however, is that regular plebs can talk back and, as it turns out, few of them are farmers, let alone Big Meat representatives yet they either agree with Florida’s new policy, or slowly come to agree with it judging by who is against it.

So who is against Florida’s new policy? Techno-optimists, experts™, vegans, investors in lab meat technology and the most ridiculous libertines with a fetish to being contrarians at all costs (some of those people’s hard drives and bank accounts should be audited, but that’s a story for another day). What to these have in common? They’re all very likely to support policy that makes the lives of regular people worse. They are, in internet lingo, non-frens.

In favor of the policy there’s mostly regular people (including more and more nominal leftists and liberals) whose political thinking is slowly evolving into something not named yet. I called it “expert-skepticism” but it could just as easily be called pro-science if that brand hadn’t already been confiscated by people who are anything but.

The screeching by the Experts™ isn’t landing anymore. In fact, more and more people straight-up say: If the Experts™ say lab grown meat is good, then it’s probably bad or at the very least not really that good.

Quite a lot of people are bringing up the experience with the pandemic hysteria – a topic where DeSantis’ skepticism was undoubtedly the superiour policy prescription and a topic the Experts™ would really love for all the rest of us to forget. Trouble is that and we won’t forget it precisely because it’s a moment where it was self-evident for almost everyone that the Experts™ are not just wrong, but malicious as well.

Just like with the Covid shots, the actual science on lab-grown meat is dubious. There’s reasonable concern that the end product might be suboptimal. There is also some proof that it may indeed be dangerous. Maybe these concerns are unfounded. But nobody can say yet and those who claim otherwise have a vested interest (be it ideological or financial) and thus can’t be trusted.

But those who support Florida’s measure don’t really care that much about the science behind it – nor should they. The very idea that we should do policy based on what marginal nerds think is preposterous. The opinion of scientists should be consulted occasionally when it’s absolutely required. This is not the case here.

Most people who support Florida’s measure are applying good ol’ fashioned common sense and experience. The government already tried to take away my freedoms based on flimsy “science” twice in the last 5 years: Once with the Covid shots and once with the silly car bans that include garden mowers in California or “green new deal” type of lunacy that created hundreds of thousands of new homeless people just in Germany alone – all on the altar of The Cimate™ and all based on dodgy science. So, under these conditions, those urging me, Joe the Voter, to now embrace lab grown meat have simply no credibility and, heuristically speaking, it is more likely than not that the correct decision is to do the opposite of what they advise.

Moreover, it doesn’t take a genius or a Harvard PhD to know that psychological reactance is a real phenomenon and that most people make decisions based on disgust. In the case of lab grown meat, not only is the disgust justified, but it just so happens to align with a lot of other interests (including the interest of real science itself).

Should obscure, unelected, unaccountable, billionaire-subsidized interests be allowed to experiment on our food supply? Enough people say no. You may disagree, but if the choice is between allowing lab grown meat unrestricted and banning it – the latter is the sensible choice in a context where no compromise is permitted.

The other side simply demands that you trust the Science™ and let them experiment with the food of your children. You may be okay with that, but enough people are simply not and convincing them otherwise will require a bit more than just calling them unevolved rubes, conspiracists or some other slur that ultimately still means Untermenschen.

The interests of “Big Agriculture” are just incidental to this discussion. The real debate is whether it should be permitted to introduce whatever the hell you want into the food supply of a nation, just because “scientists” say it’s okay now. At some point radioactive toothpaste was approved by scientists and those who warned against it were called cranks, luddites and all sorts of nasty names. Most of them were never compensated for the reputational damage they suffered as a result of being correct.

Maybe lab-grown meat is not like the radioactive toothpaste. But it may still be like Thalidomide. Most people today either don’t know this drug at all or only know it by the Thalidomide scandal. As it turns out, giving it out like candy over the counter for morning sickness ended up killing 10,000+ infants and maiming another several thousands for life. Only in Germany. Because in the late 1950s skepticism was still the norm. The FDA made the backwards and luddite decision of not allowing the German wonder-drug on the US market because they didn’t trust the German scientists. At the time, the decision was also “evidence-free” according to the techno-optimists of the time.

Today we know that Thalidomide is not straight-up poison, but it’s very dangerous and has some specific uses for good and is thus used only there while kept away from general use. If Thalidomide had been invented today, we would’ve likely killed hundreds of thousands of infants until there would’ve been a scandal because today, unlike the 1950s, skepticism towards Science™ is even rarer than it was 70 years ago.

And this is why, without conclusive data, the actual pro-science position is to be skeptical of the claims of experts and err on the side of caution.

Not all innovation is equal. Changing the type of lightbulb in the household is slightly easier to accept (since the very idea of a lightbulb isn’t exactly old) than totally upending our diets away from 100,000+ years of evolution.

Also, innovation is not value-neutral – no matter how much midwits scream otherwise. Even if the innovator intends it to be value-neutral, in the real world it won’t be. It can’t be. Because in the real world there’s people with interests and values. And lab-grown meat, at least for the time being, does not advance the values of normal people (frens) – in fact it hinders them. Lab-grown meat, for the time being, advances the interests of people who hate us (non-frens) and there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical of anything coming from the corner that hates you. Quite the opposite: It’s healthy.

By the way: This isn’t a Florida thing. Arizona is working on a similar policy. In Europe, Italy already banned this. The Romanian Senate passed a similar measure last year. Similar measures are being debated in Austria, France and Spain.

Maybe they’re all stupid or bought and paid for by Big Meat. But maybe not. Quality of food is far superiour in Europe to the good ol’ USA. So, again, heuristically speaking, it’s sensible to err on the side of caution when so many credentialed experts urge you to embrace a radical change that is quite literally unprecedented in history with a topic that is fundamental to human life.

Maybe this time the techno-optimists are right. If that’s the case, we can always change the law(s) again. But until then, it is more than reasonable to presume they’re wrong and act accordingly. Oh no… you won’t have the freedom to sell potential cancer. Yes, yes, the Scientists™ deboonked that. Here’s a link deboonking that crazy conspiracy theory. Oh, hold on, what does it say there?

Leading scientists agree that cultured meat products won’t give you cancer, but the industry doesn’t have the decades of data to prove it—so it’s trying to avoid the question instead.

Right. Then see you in a few decades when you got the data to prove it. Meanwhile, leave us alone, you demonic freaks!

In the years following their disastrous defeat in 2015, the Social-Democratic party of Denmark underwent a hostile takeover. Mette Frederiksen’s faction seized power over the party, and with it created a fundamental shift in the ideological doctrine of the party.

Gone was the obsession with feminism under Helle Thorning-Schmidt, gone was the belief in mass immigration and Inclusivity Uber Alles, replaced instead with idyllic pictures of the Danish Cloth – a white cross in a crimson field, starkly contrasted to the blue skies of midsummer promising a return to “the Denmark you know”.

Sure the red still symbolized socialism, but the white crosses did signal resistance to the ever present, looming shadow of Islam. At the time a great many Leftists wondered how this had come to pass, that the party of Thorvald Stauning would turn its back on the progress that they’d carried the banner of for so long.

Outside of Denmark, as the decay of progressivism becomes ever more apparent, a great many more Leftists will be at least as surprised, if not outright shocked, when this event replicates itself across the Left-wing parties of the Western world. The reasons for this are multifaceted, but have their origin in how the progressive narrative is falling apart at the seems as we speak.

Part One – Narrative Folding

All narratives – no matter their quality or lack thereof, undergo some sort of decay. With every new generation the status quo created by the narrative conclusions of the previous one becomes the foundation for the next. In a way, they fold in on themselves.

This can be seen in the Nordic countries with the socialistic welfare state giving way to a state enabled solipsism, most prevalent in their elder care systems.

It became so easy to simply throw your grandparents to the institutions that it has become an absolute norm to send them to a state run elder home at first given opportunity. It’s not the family’s responsibility but the state’s. And you’re weird for doing otherwise.

We also see this in much of modernity in the Christian thinking world. We began from the premise that man is violent, that force is the solution to all problems, to Christ’s teachings that we must show restraint. As restraint became the new baseline, this gave way to the notion that not only is it important to show restraint, one must be incapable of violence whatsoever; i.e. Pacifism.

Much of the West’s issues, in particular with immigration are a result of ideological pacifism on a societal level against the less obvious violence of the state and the very obvious violence of Islamist’s and Left-wing extremists

A similar effect was seen in the islamisation of the once Christian Levant. It’s mostly known as a textbook example of the power of intransigent minorities, as per Nassim Taleb:

…the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues –the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.

The two asymmetric rules were are as follows. First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam –and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.

Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages.

Taleb’s analysis is mostly focused on the stubbornness aspect of the process, but does also hint at a rather important part: not why the parents pretended to convert but why their grandchildren became genuine Muslims (and radical ones at that).

As the original event that birthed the new status quo, that being the conversion to Islam, occurred, the fake converts may still have been Christian but they had to behave Muslim in public.

Their children then found this behavior natural and therefore effortlessly acted Muslim in public, but were still close enough to the experiences of their parents that the original narrative of simply pretending to convert would hold. This may even have been true of the grandchildren in some circumstances, but eventually – and inevitably, the internal and initial narrative faded, as it had no external reality left to be attached to anymore. As a result, the descendants eventually grew up behaving Muslim, being treated Muslim and thought themselves Muslim.

The original reasons for the status quo had faded and what remained where the consequences that where seen, felt and acted upon. And any narrative anchored in perceived reality will supplant one exempt from external affirmation. Eventually.

Current year Leftism will begin to undergo this at an accelerated pace, simply because it cannot sustain itself anymore, as too many facets of their ideology have become self destructive.

The most obvious example of this self destructive tendency is the transgenderist narrative.

It is already loosing ground, we are already seeing puberty blockers being banned for minors in the UK of all places, with the rest of the narrative to follow suit over the next five to ten years With it, the rest of the trans narrative is bound to follow suit, due to the internal inconsistencies and radicalism of the ideology.

As biology cycles out the older generations, the younger ones who grew up witnessing the consequences of seeing friends and family members suffer under the consequences of being trans’d, some of which might even have experienced it themselves, they will develop a narrative of great resentment to the consequences of the previous one.

The riots and damage in the wake of BLM and following attempts at normalizing crime in American blue-states will eventually force a resolution. With or without the Left. The younger generations are already being confronted with this havoc, and propaganda can only do so much to make them ignore reality, when it hits them in the face.

The rest of the sexual deviancy of the Left – from shoehorning in homosexuality everywhere, to the attempts at normalizing pedophilia, are not only deeply unpopular with any sane person (for good reason), they’re also unpopular with the migrants the Left themselves have imported. Most immigrants from the third world – whether Mexican or Muslim, are devoutly religious and deeply opposed to such… excesses, and keeping them as a base would require the Left to begin discarding their progressive ideals.

This is not helped by their view of Israel and World War 2. WW2 is sufficiently far in the past that can no longer cause much emotional reaction when invoked.

Combine this coming emotional irrelevance with the younger Left’s hatred of Israel – and that many of the Muslim voters they pay lip service to, loathe the Jewish State as well, and it doesn’t take a genius to see what direction they’re going in.

In addition, most of the narrative power regarding the horrors of the Nazi regime is depleted. The aspect that they they were a product of nationalism, patriotism and militarism (the positive view of a strong military) are slowly decaying, partially due to this lack of emotional interest, partially accelerated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The racism aspect meanwhile is similarly unraveling as the the narrative about the Holocaust has begun to fold in on itself. Since the younger generations are growing up – not with the premise that the Holocaust was a horrid thing they saw with their own eyes (like the Greatest Generation) or with the post-Nazi sentiment that the horrors of WW2 must never be repeated and society must be organized around preventing a repeat at all costs (like the Boomers and Millennials), but with a post-post-Nazi paradigm, that any invocation of the Holocaust or Nazis or racism is used exclusively as a tool. As a tactic used in order to unfairly shut down any conversation critical of the awful policies of the current status quo. And this has reached its zenith in the last ten or so years and is well known by anyone intellectually honest.

Whether or not this results in an anti-Semitic resurgence depends on the amount and effectiveness of the censorship in the next 20 years, as the only reason the alt-right ever had anything resembling relevance was the fact that no other group than the Neo-Nazis where willing to interact with those critical of the current narrative surrounding WW2.

In some ways, we can already see that the Left is abandoning this tactic in favor of other forms of thought-terminating cliches.

A recent Atlantic article covered the rise of “chaos agents” – people willing to spread propaganda regardless of its angle solely because it would cause more conflict within the society. What this really is, is a smoking gun, that the old Nazi accusation tactic does not work anymore and that they’re now trying to replace it with new ones, in order to maintain at least some of the power that the Nazi accusations had. This specific tool will likely not work on the level of the commoner, but it will spread through the universities and intelligentsia as a tool for keeping intellectual discussion in line.

When you take all of this into account – the collapse of the trans narrative, the conservative leanings of the Left’s migrant base, the need for law and order in the wake of immigration and BLM and the increasingly radical anti-Semitism within the younger Left, it becomes obvious that the Left is going to fracture along the lines of progressive versus non-progressive

But while this faction may in ways resemble conservatives on social issues (and here I make the exception of anti-Semitism as it simply does not exist on a large scale on the right) in theory, in practice they will differ quite severely. Why?

Because at the end of the day, the modus operandi of the Left has for decades, if not centuries, been securization.

Part Two – Securization

Securization is the political science term for the study of how narratives are (re)framed to justify the centralization of power under the pretense of security (what they call a “securitized narrative”), and it has been a blatantly obvious tool of the maximal state for decades if not centuries by now.

The most obvious example of this in practice in recent memory was the pandemic project. That society must be locked down and controlled for the security and protection of our (elder’s) lives.

Worth mentioning is that the main architect of modern securization theory – Ole Wæver, was canceled during the pandemic project due to flimsy attempts at framing his work as “racist”.

People who grew up in the 2000s got to see this in the shape of cases like the Patriot act – attempts at expanding the surveillance state under the pretense of security from terrorism.

As the Left grew more dominant we’ve started to see their attempts at securization more often:

• Censorship is justified under the pretense of security, from “nazis”.
• Mass immigration is justified under the pretense of security, of the immigrants’ human rights.
• The deterioration of law and order in democrat cities is justified under the pretense of security, from police brutality
• Transing of children is justified under the pretense of security from their biology, as the therapy wont work as well if they wait, so they have to get them while young, you see.

While securization has been a tool of the establishment Right as well, it has typically been less obviously intrusive and directly harmful, as the right still has libertarian factions within it to counterbalance it. Even now that the Right began to talk about a potential Tiktok ban the suggested policy – being totalitarian as ever – has not been embraced fully by the Right, with Trump himself weighing in against it. It’s debatable whether a ban of Tiktok would be to the benefit of Facebook but, at the end of the day, his concerns do result in a limiting of governmental overreach.

On the Left meanwhile, there are no libertarian reflexes and little pragmatism inhibiting their totalitarian urges.

The thing is that most of the attempts at solving the problems caused by the insanity of the current Left can easily become securitized narratives themselves.

Now that the censorship has created extremists, their existence can be used to either justify even more censorship – or the extremists themselves can begin to argue in favor of their own forms of totalitarianism.

The violence caused by immigration and BLM can be used as justification for a massive police and surveillance state. This already happened under Mette Frederiksen where not only they argued for a massive surveillance state like totalitarian hellholes like China or Britain, but the justification for doing so was as a means of safety from the “consequences of a mistaken immigration and integration policy”. On a side note, during parliamentary debates the minister of Justice argued that since it is impossible to have any sort of freedom without safety, and a massive surveillance state would increase safety, therefore increased surveillance is an increase of freedom. This is one more reason a social-conservative Left-wing both can and will come into existence.

At this point in time, where progressivism is close to being exhausted, social-conservatism simply seems to be the easiest path to grabbing and centralizing power under the maximal state. It would also allow the Left access to the “churchcommie” elements among the politically activated.

Churchcommie is a slang term for a certain type of authoritarian social-conservative that wishes to implement a maximal state in order to stomp out whatever they view as degeneracy in society. If you told one of these people about Ceaușescu’s views on abortion (complete ban alongside contraceptives), without telling them what politician suggested it, they’d probably want to vote for him.

We have already seen such reflexes be used to securitize pornography: bans on various porn sites which we have so far first seen attempted in Britain. While the system inevitably failed due to being unenforceable, the underlying puritanical values that gave birth to this bill are real and a threat to civil liberties. And thus, easily subverted by the future Left.

Part Three – The next Left

The Left will not abandon progressivism overnight. What will happen is the fracture within the Left between progressive and non-progressive will widen ever more as the Left begins to loose power in elections. Eventually, after one too many defeats at the hand of the right, such a non-progressive faction will attempt a hostile takeover – as it happened in Denmark.

The replacement of progressive ideas with social conservative ones has happened many times before in the history of Leftism.
After Lenin’s extremely degenerate views (even by Russian standards), Stalin went in the exact opposite direction and imposed extremely harsh conservative policies (also even by Russian standards) on the Russian people(s).

Similarly Ceaușescu emerged after a much more feminist (yes, really) Soviet puppet regime in Communist occupied Romania.

After Mao’s Great Leap Forward, China slowly began to implement what can be viewed as a form of capitalism – though a very crony and highly state controlled one, as they found out that collective farms simply didn’t work.

While I doubt the Western Left’s social conservative switch will be as brutal, as they still have to win votes at the end of the day, it’ll no doubt still be terrible for the society as it will be used as a means of centralizing power – and lining the Left’s pockets in the process.
But it simply seems to be the only good means of achieving securization in the post-progressive paradigm. And also allows them to tap into the disgruntled totalitarian forces among the politically activated right.

As simple pragmatism forces the lines to blur between Left and Right it’ll become a lot harder for the right to make their case, since their current Trumpist narrative is build around them being against an obviously evil foe. You can’t do that if the foe uses your exact arguments with a different coat of paint and slightly different motives.

(On a side note, it shocked me how easy it would have been to frame this analysis as an elaborate plan by the Left: that they intend to sell a cure for a disease that they created. Though this might literally happen in some parts of California where the bubonic plague is reemerging. That said, this runs on the assumption that the Left actually knows what they’re doing. And they don’t.)

The form that this new Left would take would therefore be much more akin to the Danish Social-Democrats, not just because it is the closest they have to a template that actually makes sense and could work, but also because it is coming from a Scandinavian country.

Most of the bad ideas that are currently haunting the West may have their origin in the USA, but the R&D for them is done in Scandinavia before being shipped back for final testing and publication.

Some of the examples of this include transgenderism, the first “modern” gender reassignment surgery was performed in Denmark after all (look up Christine Jorgensen, if you must). Modern Feminism which was first implemented in true form in Sweden and the recent Atlantic article regarding “chaos agents” is based on the research of a Danish sociologist who worked with the government during the pandemic.

Even the concept of securization theory was heavily influenced by the work of Ole Wæver – also a Dane. Not to mention the notion of the welfare state itself.
“Getting to Denmark” is a common trope in political science, that a welfare “utopia” like Denmark is the desirable end goal of any society.

The Left’s fetishization of Scandinavia and it’s bad ideas is not going to end any time soon and, no doubt, looking to the now much more socially conservative, but still economically Left-wing politics of the region, is a good indicator of where the Left will go next once progressivism has been drained of all it could offer.

Part Four – Conclusions

For the Right this paradigm shift will be a poison chalice; it will only mean a renormalization of conservative values in the short term, as long as such values can be exploited to seize more power for the state. Long term, if not properly managed, this will result in the generation that will follow becoming one extremely hostile to conservative values. And, when a brain drain eventually begins to take hold on the Right, they will be stuck and incapable of inventing new ideas to work around this stigma.

It has been said that Conservatism is not so much about conserving what matters, but ensuring that the innate vices of human nature are managed in such a way their damage is minimized and hopefully turned to benefits.
Perhaps it is time that the conservatives begin managing the vices of Social-Conservatism.

The far-Left president of Brazil, Lula da Silva is in the headlines after a week ago he said the following:

Why can’t an institution like the BRICS bank have a currency to finance trade relations between Brazil and China, between Brazil and all the other BRICS countries? Who decided that the dollar was the (trade) currency after the end of gold parity?

After him, the president of Malaysia (who?!) uttered something similar and, from there on, the Cyrillic and idiograms-coughing shills started shilling. Tens of millions of words consisting of panic porn for Western audiences and hopium for ‘eastern’ audiences have already been written.

Both formats of shilling (which, by the way, is very profitable for moneyed interests) have cited some true facts – such as the dollar now representing 58% of the global reserves, down from 73% in 2001. Or the fact that the Biden administration’s fiscal policies suck.

Now, all of that is true, but does that mean dedollarization is actually happening? And if yes, at what pace? And, unless you’re a CCP shill, a Russophile or a moneyed entity (e.g. hedge fund), how is that likely to affect you?

Well, the answers are simple, but not easy: Dedollarization isn’t really happening; at the current pace (deemed “alarming” by panic porn) the yuan/renmibi will need 120 years (best case scenario!) to reach parity with America’s most profitable export. And, if you’re not a huge entity, it’s quite unlikely this will affect you in any relevant ways anytime soon (if over the age of 40 – at all in your lifetime, statistically speaking).

Graphs and numbers

Whatever your political opinion or preference concerning dollarization or dedollarization, one has to be mindful of reality.

(De)dollarization happens when enough players in the global market (both large and small) decide to trade or to no longer trade in Uncle Sam’s green notes.

While it is true that the share of dollars used for trade declined a bit in the last 12 months (as seen on the graph), that decline is mostly in favour of the Euro and the Japanese Yen, and not in favor of the renmibi/yuan, which is the only potential serious competitor (more on that further down).

This reality can be framed in propaganda terms as an inherent strength of the US dollar (which may very well be the case, though impossible to know just yet) but the more likely explanation is that the only entity that really started to use yuan/renmibi is the government of Russia. The entire economy of Russia was smaller than Italy’s before the escalation started in February 2022. Today, it’s smaller than that (though still unclear how much smaller). Of that whole pie, the government is a big player, but no more than half. The other half – the Russian people that is – continues to queue at banks for dollars and euros. And even most Russian state companies continue to hoard dollars a lot more than yuans.

So, in the end, the share of yuan/renmibi in the global trade shouldn’t have increased by much and, indeed, it did not.

Moreover, with all of the belt-and-road initiatives and other predatory loan schemes that the CCP has launched over the last decade, the share of yuan in the global debt is still to be rounded down to its nearest integer – specifically zero.

In other words, statistically nobody takes a loan in yuans. Not even Chinese semi-private otherwise huge entities such as China Construction Bank Corp. or Tencent Holdings. Even those prefer to take their loans in dollars.

Even Chinese companies who are in the business of financial predatory practices in Africa still denominate most of their stuff in US dollars, pound sterling or the local currency (which is routinely pegged with the euro or the US dollar).

Now, all of these entities could in theory decide to no longer do that. But they don’t. And won’t anytime soon because…

The CNY/RMB dual system

The vast majority of the people who write about this topic fail to mention this fundamental aspect: China has three currencies: The renmibi, the yuan and the digital yuan. Each with its own exchange rate, degree of convertibility, capital controls applied on it and a plethora of other issues.

If you have a $5 bill and you’re hungry, in more than 180 countries on Earth (including China, Russia, North Korea or Turkmenistan) you will eat something in exchange for the $5 bill. Someone will trust your $5 bill enough to give you something to eat in exchange for it. Does this hold true for the ¥50 bill? We all know the answer: and it’s a resounding NO.

The reason is not (necessarily) a geopolitical one. It’s not that most people on Earth hate China necessarily. After all, the same holds true with the Uzbek Sumy or the Zimbabwean Bond. Also, if geopolitical opinion or hate would play a role, then surely CCP and FSB officials wouldn’t be holding their own savings in US dollars.

Also read: Somali Shilling hits record 15 years high

The reason is much simpler: Convertibility. Uncle Sam’s greens are trustworthy enough to be convertible almost everywhere, almost all the time. And if you get a $50 bill in Russia and fly to Capetown, you know you can spend the $50 there too. And if you want to use it to buy American goods or services, that’ll do as well. Nobody cares you got the $50 bill in Russia. None of this holds true with the yuan.

The yuan (CNY) only exists internationally. You can use it to buy goods or services from places outside of Mainland China that also happen to accept CNY (which,… aren’t that many). If you fly to Beijing and want to use it, you first have to convert them into renmibi (RMB) which is the “people’s currency”. Depending on the amount, the degree to which the CCP despises you and your social credit score, this process may be denied to you. Imagine not being able to use your legally earned dollars in the US because you earned them in another country. This is the reality for holders of yuan.

And then there’s the digital yuan which is a form of CBDC with the worst negative aspects of it and none of the benefits. CBDCs should be convenient and easily convertible but the digital yuan is anything but.

Now, that’s not to say that the yuan couldn’t, in theory, in some future, replace the US dollar as the global currency. It could. But this yuan, as it stands now, won’t. For sure. And reforming this mess can’t be done in under 10 years and the necessary reforms won’t be made anytime soon anyway because Xi Jinping and the CCP show no interest in that (assuming they have the competence, which they might).

BRICS currency? Fun fact: NO

Beyond the yuan, there is no other potential competitor to the US dollar.

The yuan at least has the theoretical possibility of giving a shot because it comes from a large industrialized economy – but the internal dysfunctionalities of the Chinese economy are preventing this. In short: socialism is still bad for business.

In fact, given China’s size, it is indeed quite remarkable how low yuan’s share of trade financing is. As the world’s largest goods-trading nation, the CNY’s share should be bigger, but it’s not. Because internationalizing the currency is a complicated process which involves reforms that the CCP is either unable or unwilling to implement. For this reason alone (even disregarding all the other practical and financial reasons) the continued status of the dollar as a reserve currency is all but guaranteed.

The next competitor would be the Euro. But the Euro is the currency of a disparate group of 20 states with varying fiscal policies, debt, and equity markets that also suffered a significant sovereign debt crisis a little more than a decade ago. It’s the currency that tried to have inflation for years – and then got all of the wanted inflation all in one fell swoop in a single year, triggering a cost of living crisis that has still not resolved.

The chances of the Euro becoming the alternative for the US dollar in ways that matter globally are quite slim. But even if that were to happen, most €urozone countries are US allies so what you’d get would be DINO (Dedollarization In Name Only). In the end, roughly 84% of world trade is in US dollars and 6% is in Euros. And the Euro as a unified currency has been around for 24 years.

Now imagine a BRICS currency – which would be the currency of a disparate group of at least 5 states with varying fiscal policies, debt, equity markets and economic visions and models. Personally, I would love to see such an experiment attempted. The shitshow that the €uro is would look like an orderly and civilized currency compared to a BRICS currency. Though, upon further thought, such an experiment would deeply harm almost 2 billion people so… it’s better if this is not attempted.

One thing is certain though: a BRICS currency would not threaten the US dollar’s dominance basically ever. For roughly the same reasons the Euro can’t either.

B-b-but crypto?

One tool cited for advancing dedollarization are digital currencies – be them CBDCs or cryptocurrencies.

Well, just like with the Euro and the hypothetical BRICS currency – this is quite unlikely. CBDCs barely exist and are already encountering plenty of issues. For them to reach the level of trust of the people necessary to convince enough people and entities to switch to them from the US Dollar… that’s many decades down the road, if ever.

With crypto, things are even wilder. Bitcoin, barely used as a medium of exchange, saw its value in dollar terms collapse by 75% from late 2021 to late 2022 before bouncing back in April 2023. If you think enough people would be willing to denominate their real-world assets in electronic gobbledygook that varies so wildly that makes the Great Depression fluctuations look like a walk in the park… if you believe that, I have a nice beautiful bridge in Malmö for sale.

Cryptocurrencies have proven themselves to be a great speculative asset but… that’s about it. Cryptobros would argue that it’s a good store of value, but that’s a more complicated issue and quite far from the promises of the crypto evangelists (and yes, they unironically call themselves that).

But even if we grant that (at least some) cryptocurrencies are decent stores of value, that still doesn’t make any of them potential competitors for the US dollar anytime soon. When I’ll be able to take my satoshi and buy bread with it right now, then we can start that conversation.

I will also remind crypto-enthusiasts that El Salvador became known for its very tough, but highly effective, approach on law and order – not for its experiments with Bitcoin as a legal tender.

Nobody in El Salvador and nobody relevant outside El Salvador praises President Nayib Bukele for his crypto policy. But everyone is curious how the murder rate dropped by more than 50% in a single year and by more than 1300% in the last 7 years. THAT is interesting and a stunning accomplishment to study! Cryptocurrency marginal nerd stuff? Not so much.

To sum up

Dedollarization as a phenomenon is neither new nor something necessarily scary. In fact, Brazil in 2013 (also under the same far-Left corrupt leadership) signed an even bigger treaty with the CCP also with the intent to bring about dedollarization. Does anyone even remember that one? It’s certainly nowhere to be found on the graphs concerning global trade, so we can safely say it was all panic porn and/or good ol’ propaganda.

Other countries, such as Chile and Israel (in the 1990s) have adopted measures to reduce their direct exposure to the US Dollar in order to reduce market volatility and increase macroeconomic stability and investor confidence. The results were somewhat mixed if judged by the stated objectives but one thing is certain: None of them stopped trading in dollars. In fact, they both trade in dollars more today than before their “dedollarization” policies were implemented.

For all intends and purposes, the US dollar’s dominance is here to stay. This will change if and only if a freely traded and convertible alternative will appear and only if that alternative will gain enough confidence of enough people and entities and that alternative will be usable widely and easily for trade, reserves and finance. All of these conditions have to be met cumulatively.

That alternative might as well be the yuan. But might as well be the Indian ruppee (given that India’s economic growth is much more sustainable). But that’s way too much into the future and any prediction made now will only turn true by sheer luck. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!

Assuming things don’t get worse in CCP-land, the growth in Chinese trade will eventually lead to the yuan growing in importance – in the sense of going from 4%-ish now to… maybe 7 or 8, possibly outpacing the Euro. But the road to replace the US dollar is far longer and that assumes the US will always be under incompetent management as it is now.

Oh, and let’s not forget the real global currency – SDR (code XDR). Currently, the XDR basket consists of the following five currencies: U.S. dollar 43.38%, euro 29.31%, renminbi/yuan 12.28%, Japanese yen 7.59% and British pound sterling 7.44%. So, in other words, US-aligned interests hold 87.72%. I’d say the Empire is in good shape.

It took two world wars, multiple genocides, the slow-motion train-wreck of “decolonization” and quite a few other shocking financial events to finally dethrone the British pound sterling from its status as the main global currency. And, even now, it’s still relevant. Dethroning the dollar will be at least equally hard.

Governments and politicians (alongside their shills and some moneyed interests) will grumble, will whine, will complain, will grandstand, will throw a temper tantrum (see Putin) but, when push comes to shove, they will still be more likely than not to be using the US dollar as the global reserve currency for many, many years to come. Что делать? Нечего делать 🤷🏻‍♂️

Last year my home country’s state media, Danmarks Radio, made a documentary about a man traveling to the lowlands in order to seek assisted suicide. The documentary was lambasted by its critics for its one sided depiction of assisted suicide as solely positive thing, and devoid of criticism on the subject – something not even its most ardent defenders could disagree with.

In the ensuing reemergence of the topic into popular discourse, I would often wrap up the long list of reasons why assisted suicide is abhorrent up in a joke that all it’d be good for would be to cut expenses on elderly care and rid us of those god damn boomers.

It quickly occurred to me, however, that this joke, might actually be much less unlikely that I initially thought.

Part One: The Cultural aspect

The first reason for this is cultural; the youth throughout the Western world have developed a deep, burning resentment of the boomers as most of the cultural, political and economic shifts that have made modernity unbearable can be aptly laid at the feet of their boomer parents.

From leftism, to the Stakhanovite work ethic, crendentialism, over-regulation of the economy, the opening up of the Western world to mass immigration and the outright refusal to pass on any wisdom or wealth to the newer generations, boomers have done much to make the youth hate them.

Something that is further fermented by the youth worship coming from the climate crowd which has claimed over and over that the old in their ignorance have ruined the planet and it is up to the youth – by agitating for the right grifts of course – to save it.

The result? A consensus among millenials and zoomers – though still not formulated in these terms, that they have been born and raised to essentially function as serfs for their parents’ generation.

The pandemic has simply been the cherry on top. Showcasing that the boomers (through the political class) would happily ruin their children’s mental health, destroy their chances of future economic prosperity and take from them what should have been the happiest days of their lives, all so they themselves can live 89 years and 2 months, instead of 88 years and ten months.

For a personal example there were plenty of articles from left-wing youth in my home country ranging from decrying the harm that sanitary fascism had caused them, to referring to boomers as ”greedy pigs” for throwing their children under the bus, to outright calling for a generational tax as payment for the lockdown.

And this is not to mention that the topic of outright removing the elderly has been brought up in an intellectual setting. As a Yale professor recently called for the Japanese elderly to commit mass suicide, as well as ”broaching the topic of mandatory euthanasia”.

For these reasons I doubt the understanding that assisted suicide will lead to the elderly euthanized against their will do much to dissuade the masses from its implementation.

If anything it’ll likely increase enthusiasm for the practice among some age groups.

Part Two: Economics

The other part of this is simple economics; The pension system was never intended as a simple means of care for the old, by design.

As most parts of the modern welfare state, the pensions were an invention of Prussia.

However, the stated goal of this system – a tax on the citizenry that’d go to provide for the elderly when they became too old to earn their own living, was never the intended goal of the Prussian state, as most Prussian citizens taxed for it would die before being able to enjoy the benefits of the system.

The actual goal of the pension taxes where simply that. Taxes to further finance Der Preußische Staat and fuel its war machine.

While most of the West no longer spends much of its budget on military, the pension system still serves its goal as a well propagandized tax.

It is here worth mentioning that the pensions paid to the State are not put in a personal savings account for the individual taxpayer, but treated as any other part of the state income. While the pension expenses are being paid out to those currently on pensions at any given time.

What is immediately striking about this system is how much it resembles a pyramid scheme.

In order for it to work there must at any given time be more people paying into the system than there are being propped up by it.

That will cease to be the case once the boomers hit retirement. Simply due to the shear size of their generation compared to the millenials and zoomers.

The resulting collapse of the pension system – as well as the exodus of such a huge part of the workforce, will likely be severe enough that it could crash national economies, should the state actually maintain the system.

As it is inevitable that the boomers will retire over the next ten or so years, governments will be pressed to deal with this issue under threat of financial collapse. And assisted suicide to slowly remove the excess retirees seems a simple solution. Especially as a centralized authority wouldn’t even need to enforce mass euthanasia.  The hospitals and retirement homes, doubly so in the public sector, will happily euthanize any patients exceeding their budgets on their own.

Especially as any type of workplace tasked with helping people who cannot fight back will inevitably become flooded with sociopaths in search of easy victims to play with.

Conclusions and predictions

There will at least be a strong attempt to implement assisted suicide across the western world.

Due to the economic nature of trying to alleviate pressure from a dysfunctional status quo, the most likely parties to implement it will, in my eyes at least, not be ones on the far left, but the corrupt, managerial corporatist parties of the center.

The countries most likely to implement it will be Germany, and Denmark. Germany due to its predominant managerial corporatist politics, rampant progressivism and deeply totalitarian culture and Denmark due to it’s heavily ingrained disdain for its elderly.

The rest of Scandinavia I am less sure about; Norway has the most totalitarian culture in Scandinavia, but also has enough oil reserves that it could afford a pension crash. Sweden is undergoing too many social changes as a result of not only mass immigration but also a resurgent right to make accurate predictions for.

The last of the likely candidates for implementing assisted suicide is Italy, as it has already seen a push for a referendum on the practice (although one that was shut down by the Constitutional Court), has an already geriatric population and is well known to follow whatever trends are declared on high from the European Union. Should Berlin follow Brussels in implementing the practice, Rome will be quick to follow as well.

One last, though less likely candidate would be the United Kingdom, due the increasingly authoritarian states in the archipelago that have already done much to imitate their former colonial subjects (Canada, Australia and New Zealand, with the US being a notable exception). My guess is that it would first be implemented in Scotland by the SNP, though it would still be probable that the Tory government force it through in England.

Assisted suicide will likely not gain 50+1% support, nor does it need it.

The topic merely needs to be high profile enough in the popular discourse that it gives an excuse for implementation.

Since most of the public either does not understand that the policy will lead to mass killings in the retirement homes or view it as a good thing there will not be a public outcry, let alone any actions that’d actually prevent the policy from being passed.

And the aforementioned radical minority in support of the practice, will make it easy to maintain for decades to come.

And in this regard I most sincerely hope that I am wrong.

 

At the beginning of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, multiple countries (and not just Western ones) imposed various types of sanctions on the Russian economy. The imposition of the sanctions’ regime was relatively well executed but very poorly communicated to the public.

The public was told (or was given the impression) that the Russian economy would collapse within months because it’s the toughest sanctions regime ever imposed on a country. The latter part was absolutely correct, but the former was clearly not entirely honest.

As a result, the public’s trust in the sanctions regime was needlessly shaken due to the high expectations – leading some to lean on exaggeration in the other direction, so far as to believe Putin’s claims that the sanctions had little or no effect. That’s also wrong. So, how’s it going?

Withdrawal of major companies

For once, someone in Academia actually did something useful for the public. So the Chief Executive Leadership Institute from the Yale School of Management went into the enormous undertaking of actually tracking down all of the big non-Russian corporations with business in Russia to see if they actually do make any move as (so many of them) promised.

1586 companies ended up on Yale’s list which gets upgraded at least once a week (last update on February 26, 2023), graded from A (complete exit from Russia) to F (digging in).

The result? 521 companies fully exited Russia (grade A) and another 500 curtailed most or all operations (grade B). On the opposite end of the spectrum, 238 companies either continue as normal or are actively expanding in Russia (“digging in” – grade F).

This in itself is extraordinary. Over 2/3 success rate in fact beats the previous attempt at a global boycott, which happened against Apartheid South Africa 35 years ago.

With that said, there is still room for improvement. There are many companies from Austria, G*rmany, France, Italy, the USA or the United Kingdom that are on the “grade F” list.

Cloudflare, Buzzi Unicem (Italy), BT Group (UK) or Doka (Austria) are some of the Western companies that are still operating in Russia that can still be… persuaded into no longer doing so.

Industry

The automobile production in Russia took a nosedive by 67% – and that’s according to Rosstat (the official Russian Statistic Institute, hardly a trustworthy source). The Russian automobile plants churned out 450.000 cars in 2022, according to Kommersant. That’s less than Romania, whose plants churned out 507.000 cars in 2022, which is not a record for Romania. Keep in mind that of those ~450k cars produced in 2022, quite a few of them are Soviet-era Moskvich which we don’t even know if they work.

75% of car-related transactions in Russia are of used cars, mostly second or third-hand from Japan. The overall number of transactions and production are lower than the 2009 global financial crisis.

To make things worse, there are no chips for anything. Russian leadership hoped to replace what they can’t get from the West by buying from China. There’s just one problem: the Chinese-supplied chips have an enormous failure rate. 40% of the chips delivered to Russia are defective. Such a failure rate makes any sensible production planning impossible. And the goods that are produced with the non-defective ones, obviously, end up being more expensive.

Other industries are under all sorts of weird pressures. So, for instance, Russia can produce its own steel, right? Well, yes, but… some raw materials used to be sourced from Kazakhstan. But Kazakhstan is no longer willing to sell. So the Russian plants now have to source it from within Russia but from further away from the plants (geographically speaking).

Speaking of Kazakhstan, the country bounces between refusing to sell steel to Russia to selling enormous amounts at dumping prices – distorting the Russian market in unpredictable ways. This is reported by Kommersant, which can’t be suspected of a pro-sanctions or anti-Russia bias.

Workforce

The Mayor of Moscow wrote in an official blogpost that things will get rough as hundreds of thousands of people are simply left with nothing to do in the city as everything relevant for them is closed or will be closed. That was in April 2022. Since then, the mayor has been subjected to a special persuasion operation to shut up about it. Even so… the numbers he presented were still real.

In response to multiple such situations (not just in Moscow) the government responded by trying really hard to absorb as many people as possible into various furlough schemes, fake or real government jobs or early retirement. Sure, over the short run, this eases the tension. But for how long can this be sustained? And who funds it? (more on that in a bit)

Nobody really knows how many people left Russia. According to research by The Bell, at least 512,000 people left Russia and did not come back (as of December 2022). This number is the most conservative estimate and most likely wrong, given that just Kazakhstan reported a bit over 200,000 border crossings one way (from Russia to Kazakhstan) without any returns.

Whatever number you choose to believe, one thing is certain: Almost all of the people that left are resourceful (and thus a lost tax base for the State).

This exodus (called “relocation” on Russian groups) strained the public resources of Georgia in particular but, eventually, slowly, things settled down on the host countries. Keep in mind that the exodus isn’t over. The industrial park in Tashkent (empty at my visit there in August 2022) is now full. With “relocated” Russians. After all, someone’s gotta fix the thermal energy distribution of the city, which is in dire straits, so why not fighting age Russian men?

Finance

In late August of 2022 I wrote an article about how unimportant is the official exchange rate of the Rouble given that it’s not a convertible currency. Since then, one thing has changed: Now nobody can exchange Roubles at anywhere near the “official” rate. Not even Raiffeisen Bank, which even went as far as to recognize Putin’s republics, can’t exchange Roubles at the official rate. Raiffeisen is now under an OFAC investigation in the USA. Insh’Allah they get sanctioned.

But, Raiffeisen notwithstanding, the fact remains that nobody buys Roubles. Which means the current “official” exchange rate is wholly artificial and meaningless.

And since nobody buys Roubles, that means nobody is buying Russian bonds either. So how is Putin financing the enormous deficits? Well… the foreign currency reserves. According to the Central Bank of Russia, the state consumed between 7 and 11 billion dollars worth of foreign currency per week. That sounds bad, but not so bad.

Just one problem: All of the statistics officers from both Rosstat and Банк России have been replaced at least three times since the onset of the war. Before the war, they used to be replaced every 6 years or so.

Energy

Here’s where things are a bit more complicated than both the West and Russia are willing to admit.

The EU countries “sold” the sanctions to their people as relatively easy to implement. The practice showed that it was a bit more complicated than previously thought. With that said, all things considered, things turned out quite okay. Europe didn’t freeze to death and, compared to other historical energy crises, countries of Europe fared better than expected.

Russia, on the other hand, “sold” to its people the message that Europe can’t decouple from Russia and that, if things really go south, there’s always India and China eager to buy in huge amounts as both countries are big consumers of fossil fuels.

Just one problem: Saying so is easier said than done.

It takes at least 6 years to build the necessary pipelines in order to deliver gas to China or India. So far, not a single centimeter of a new pipeline has been built. Translation: Russian isn’t selling excess gas to Asia. It can’t.

On oil, the logistics are easier, but India and China put a downward pressure on the price. Or, in common parlance, Russia is selling oil to India and China at a steep discount and routinely at a loss.

You see, extracting oil is not rocket science but it’s still a technologically complex process if you want to also be able to deliver it at a competitive price. And a year of sanctions and the departure of Western energy companies (and with them, their know-how) is taking its toll. Russia’s production price is now higher than the global norm. And continue to climb up as installations start to break down and fixing them is no longer that easy as it was in January 2022.

Ironically, it is in fact desirable that India and China continue to buy more and more oil from Russia at higher and higher discounts because, in doing so, it makes Russia lose money at an accelerated pace. And I have no doubt that’s exactly what’s going to continue to happen because China has no qualms in pillaging Russia for its natural resources.

What we don’t know

Russia stopped filing its paperwork with the IMF, the World Bank, the ITO and other institutions in July and hasn’t allowed the minimum scrutiny required ever since. In parallel, Russian ethnics within the IMF replaced the missing data with the reports from the Kremlin (unverified, even minimally, by anyone). This led to the IMF, World Bank et. al. to publish effectively Kremlin propaganda for months on end.

The situation has been discovered mostly by accident basically last week and hasn’t been corrected yet. So any report from IMF, World Bank, etc. on the GDP of Russia or any other economic data is, for the time being, untrustworthy.

Same goes for the Rosstat reports on some aspects of the economy (especially labor force and demographics) for the second half of the year 2022. the people working on them have been changed/reshuffled at least three times in the last 12 months. That’s a lot.

Even if we were to presume this was not done in order to get yes-men apparatchiks in place, that would twist the numbers to lie for the Kremlin – the mere disruption in the workflow is enough to render the reports for the second half of 2022 at least untrustworthy until further rectification. And there is no reason to assume any of that.

So when Putin says the Russian economy fell by 2.1% in 2022, there is no way to check whether that’s true. Same goes when a Western analyst says that it actually fell by X%. That guy doesn’t know that either. We have some reliable data (I presented some of it above) but we’re still missing quite a bit on other variables in order to make a semi-decent projection.

Some conclusions

So, do the sanctions work? If by “work” you mean the way they were sold to the public in March 2022, then the answer is no.

However, if by “work” one means “steadily and consistently eating away at the economical foundations of the modern part of the Russian economy” – then the answer is yes. Faster than I expected, quite honestly.

I had expected that inertia will take 15 months at the very least to catch up but, as it turns out, many aspects worked-out faster.

Imposing sanctions was a good idea, all in all. But it was a mistake to sell them to the public as a silver bullet against Russia, because such framing needlessly lowered the Western public’s trust in them and gave free talking points to Solovyov et. al. for no benefit.

Luckily, for all of us, the quality of Russian propaganda also took a nosedive lately. And visibly so for anyone who has been following this topic for more than three years. It could be because some of the people at RT and other places were in fact Ukrainian and are now refugees in Kazakhstan.

And while I’m glad that Russian propaganda took a nosedive, it is alarming that the West’s strategic communication is in such a terrible shape. Слава Богу we’re facing Russia of 2023 and not Russia of 2014 in the propaganda department.

Denmark is often held as some sort of Utopia by the Western world due to its welfare state and highly homogeneous culture. Much has been said about not just the positives, but also more recently, by the political right, the negatives of such a system. However, neither side has ever truly understood what the pros and cons of the Danish way are, nor what type of society would accept it in the first place.

The Danish way of thinking is, in many ways, self-contradicting and it is just as hard to wrap one’s head around it as it is with the Russian mindset. This would have been more apparent, were it not for the complete absence of conflict within the Danish state.

All societies have a more or less formal contract with their state, some founding principle that makes it legitimate in the eyes of the people: In the US this is the upholding of the Constitution; in China – to avoid a repeat of the starvation events under Mao and ensure everyone has food on the table. In Denmark, it is simply to preserve a state of comfort.

While the same is true of the rest of Scandinavia, the Danish mindset has evolved, for the most part, naturally, with little deliberation on the part of the state.

Danish culture has been in large part defined by the presence of the state, in ways that most free countries simply have not. The most apparent of which is family structure or, better said, the lack thereof as the individual is completely atomized.

The average Danish child will be placed into a kindergarten from the age of 3 – 4 years old with minimal interaction with their parents, as both of them typically are working full time to afford the bills that come with having the highest tax pressure in the world, and second worst purchase power parity in Europe.

Their middle aged parents do not fare much better, as divorce is frequent enough as to become ubiquitous. Here it is worth mentioning that Danish adolescents are among the first to move out of their parents’ home in Europe. While I do not see this as inherently negative, it does add to the overall state of disconnect within the family. This disentanglement is perversely mirrored in the usual treatment of the elderly in Denmark.

Children do not interact much with their parents after they move out, and the parents life is expected to go on as usual until they are too old to live on their own. At this point the overwhelming standard is to let your parents be institutionalized. This is so common to the point where any other arrangement is practically unheard of.

With the exception of the occasional visit, the parents are left completely out of sight and thus out of mind. It’s the polar opposite of Italy, where the child is expected to either move out at some point in their forties, or simply inherit the family home and take care of their parents until their death.

While abuse is not the absolute standard within retirement homes, it is frequently reported on. It is not unusual for horror stories of elderly, no longer capable of standing on their own and bedridden, to be neglected by social workers that simply don’t want to help them get to the bathroom, and instead leave them mired in their own fecal matter for several days.

Its not that anyone wants this abuse to continue per se, in fact the topic has had mainstream attention both in the media, among political parties, and in political satire for several decades now. The truth is quite simple, and quite depressing: No one cares.

This is not meant in the sense that people find the abuse mentioned above acceptable, they don’t. Instead no one really thinks about or wants to do anything to change things.

A far leftist and former friend of mine once said that the greatest boon of the welfare state was that it “liberated him from his own morality”. Thanks to it, he argued, there was no need to care about the homeless, the poor, his family, or anyone other than himself, because ”society will take care of it”.

While many Danes would feel repulsed by such a statement, there is a kernel of truth to it: The welfare state has in its own perverse way ”liberated” the individual from his morality and responsibility. This is at least in part what we are seeing with the disentanglement between families and the elderly.

Denmark is a deeply apathetic country, and the odd thing about this characteristic apathy, whether towards governmental overreach, abuse in the social sector or blatant corruption, is that there is barely any propaganda effort from the state itself involved. Rather there simply is a disinterest so ubiquitous as to become part of the background noise, as it permeates every part of the Danish worldview: both empathically, intellectually, and politically, in ways that often appear paradoxical.

The national self-image vexes between viewing ourselves as a small, irrelevant spot in the middle of Europe to extreme arrogance over our glorious welfare state, especially compared to those stupid Americans that are constantly shooting each other or going broke from their dysfunctional, obviously anti-human private healthcare system. Although self-contradictory at a glance, these two ideas can coexist in people’s heads at the same time without cognitive dissonance, as they are not two mutually exclusive ideas, but rather a single, logically coherent narrative that can produce diametrically opposed feelings depending on the context: This national narrative, referred to as “Lilliput Chauvinism” by the politician Uffe Østergaard, is best summarized as “we are small and irrelevant but our socially homogenous and deeply empathetic culture has resulted in the north – and in particular us, creating a much more humane, and happy society than the rest of the globe.”

Like how a faucet can produce either warm or cold water, depending on how you turn the knobs, the focal point of the narrative can be altered to hone in on either the inferiority aspect as a means to deflect criticism of flaws brought to the surface, or the superiority, to induce a delusional belief in the superiority of the Danish system – which therefore does not need to be altered, as there’s no need to change what is already as good as it gets.

Complementing this is the insular nature of Danish society. Not much is reported on or understood, or even paid attention to of our neighboring countries. There is some superfluous reporting on whatever happens in the United States, usually ripped straight from their legacy media, and sometimes Sweden (since the border with them is right next to our capital) but that’s about it. Rarely is anything ever reported about Norway, Germany or Britain. The cultural insularity of the nation solidifies it’s inferiority-superiority complex, since the country as a whole is simply not aware or interested in other ways of structuring a society.

For a personal example, a family movie I watched as a small child had a song in the intro credits with lyrics such as:

man er som man er det kan ikke laves om
man går rudnt og ser ud som maan gjorde da man kom
du kan drømme om at være en kineser I new yok
men man er som man er og det er godt nok.

En hest er en hest en kat er en kat
de er ligesåforskellige som dag og som nat…
og tyskere og svenskere er også en slags menesker
og rødhårede piger er kønne

You are as you it cannot be changed
one walks around and look as one did when you arrived
you can dream about beign a chinese in New York
But you are what you are and it’s good enough

A horse is a horse a cat is a cat
they’re as different as day and as night
and Germans and Swedes are people too I suppose
and read-haired girls are cute

The song is quite indicative of the mentality here. Danes are not devoid of humour, especially not when at the expense of our neighbours, due to historical beef turned banter (as is the case with practically all Old World countries). But there’s also this notion that what you are is pretty good, so there’s no need to do anything about it, or change, or improve. What you are is more or less “good enough”.

This is certainly not helped by the populace’s disinterest in seeking out knowledge or wisdom on their own.
It’s not that Danes are stupid, as the over representation among Nobel price winners for instance shows, but that their thinking is rigid. Knowledge is only gathered and created, and expertise only acquired within already established fields, such as the hard sciences, and outside them, is a dearth of intellectual curiosity. Appeal to experts is commonplace and expert opinion is paraded around by the media on a daily basis.

It is not without reason Denmark has not had a renowned thinker – neither globally, nor domestically, since Søren Kirkegaard. On a related note, Denmark has not created many cultural movements of its own for at minimum the last 100 years. More often than not, ideas are simply imported from abroad, as was the case with Lutheran Protestantism by the priest Hans Thausen or with the welfare state itself, originally imported from Bismarck’s Prussia, until it developed a life of its own here.

Much of this lack of interest can be traced back to the 1800s: Following the loss of Norway to Sweden during the Napoleonic wars, Denmark entered a cultural period known as Romantikken, or the romantic period. The core idea was that ”what was lost externally, must be won internally”. No longer was Denmark to pay attention to anything outside of it’s own borders, as it refused to look away from its rural landscapes through rose tinted glasses; effectively romanticising what was left of the country in an attempt to ignore the nation’s sorry state of affairs.

It is here we find the source of Danish Lilliput chauvinism, as both a coping and a defence mechanism against harsh reality, as it reminded us of our own inadequacy.

This can also be seen in the notion of the Janteloven, a set of laws unique to the fictional town of Jante, made as a satire of Scandinavia’s stigma against excellence:

Don’t believe you are anything
don’t believe you are as much as us
Don’t believe you are smarter than us
Don’t believe you are better than us
Don’t believe you know more than us
Don’t believe you are more than us
Don’t believe you amount to anything
Don’t laugh at us
Don’t believe anyone likes you
Don’t believe you can teach us anything

At no point has this order of affairs ever truly been disputed. While the central focus of the following era, the modern breakthrough, indeed was that the nation ought to cease its nostalgic ruminations and face cruel reality, the cruel reality in question was the suffering of the poor and the working class, underneath the classicist society. It was essentially proto-socialism. Created a century before Marx was even born and complete with deconstructive reinterpretations of established folklore to serve the anti-idealistic bend of the era. Added to these is a fear of going outside of the system.

Dissent is allowed, but only in predetermined ways by going through the system itself, never around it, and it is frowned upon to criticise individuals working in the bureaucracy as “just doing your job” is a commonplace and acceptable justification for state overreach. The result? A society unwilling to engage in the historical arena (with the blessing of its geography), uninterested in learning from others and dedicated to the alleviation of harm from its citizens, and one which has effectively produced an “end of history”-like scenario.

There are no conflicts here and with the exception of a brief almost bloodless invasion by – and immediate submission to – Nazi Germany in the 1940s, the notion that you need to defend what you hold dear, that there’s something it must be defended against, and whether it was even worth defending in the first place, is mute. In its place there’s a perpetual state of nothing ever happening.

It can be seen even in the language too: For instance, the standard response to being asked how are things going is “stille og roligt/quiet and calm”.
Another example is the word “hygge”. Which is often paraded around as the quintessential Danish word, as it has no direct translation. The approximate is a mix between “cozy” and “comfy”. That feeling of sitting and chilling with your friends and feeling pleasant while nothing is really happening.

I’m defining it because Danish does not typically make use of a direct word for “scary” or “horrifying” instead the most commonly used word is “uhygge”. It’s much like how Russian does not have a direct mainstream word for “safety” or “security” but instead uses “undanger” [безопасность].

As nothing is happening, and will never happen, conflict is viewed as unnecessary and abnormal if not to some extend unnatural, if it is ever placed in bigger doses than the occasional joke about the Nazis or drawing of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban here and there. The ability for, and conceptualization of, conflict taking place is not only absent on a national scale but on the individual level as well. No one is capable of starting conflicts and no one has the necessary mental reflexes to handle it.

This conflict avoidance leads to an odd form of moderation, where the victim of the state will always react to abuse by pleading. If the state overreaches, the reaction will always begin by admitting one is themselves guilty before stating that what’s happening is absurd. There won’t be any backlash, only a plead for a slightly thinner slice of the salami to be served this time around. This is arguably why the country has some of the highest anti depressant consumption in the world.

It is not that we batter our children into soulless drones, it’s that we don’t need to. Because the concept of conflict simply does not exist inside the little Danish world. As there’s simply no practical way of venting frustrations people simply give up trying or become bitter and resentful, as the shadow parts of the human mind are not being allowed to fully integrate. The populace may act nice but it is not good.

And if you dig deep enough down underneath that outer layer of niceness in a Dane’s psyche, you’ll find something you won’t like looking at.

Over the course of this past November, three countries were expected to see a wave of right wing success in their upcoming elections. Denmark, Brazil, and the United States, were embroiled in elections of great importance – not so much due to the next four years of government, but for the long term cultural trends they represent.

All three countries saw significant right wing success around 2016, followed by what is now a surprisingly successful pushback from their left wing status quo.

In America, this has been in the form of the disastrous last two years of the Biden administration as well as mediocre results for the right in the Midterms. Mediocre enough that Donald Trump’s future as the GOP’s main presidential candidate has been openly questioned.

In Brazil, a hostile state apparatus sought to quell the flames of support for Bolsonaro and the left has now successfully ousted him during this past election.

And in my home country of Denmark, our left-wing government had successfully taken on the mantle of populism to win the elections back in 2019, only to impose lockdowns and egregious breaches of the Constitution under the pandemic.

During the elections of this past November they not only managed to maintain an almost unchanged number of votes compared to 2019, the social liberal party that forced them to call an election over their continued breaches of the constitution and peoples trust have seen their voter base cut in half.

As a morbidly ironic cherry on top, several of the small villages of northern Jutland that relied heavily on mink farming voted overwhelmingly for the political party that destroyed their way of life.

Despite the large differences in the cultures of these three countries as well as how the reassertions have played out, the right-wingers in all three countries had developed very similar, but equally dangerous narratives on what should have happened;

These narratives all revolve around some form of revolution, wherein the capital P People have realized the tyrannical nature of the left and rise up, and through the Democratic Process push the country back towards Truth, Justice, and Liberty, and render us from corruption and progressive tyranny. It just so happens that it didn’t pan out that way.

The cause of this dissonance between right wing mythology and left wing reality however, is not to be found in some unknown source of leftist competence, or a successful propagandizing of the voters, but in the Right itself.
Specifically the populist savior mythos that the right has capitalized on since the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016.

Here, it is important to make a distinction between populist policies and populist savior mythos. Populist policies are merely whatever form of policies are written with the intent of appealing to the working man. Things like lowering immigration, or removing CRT propaganda from schools are contemporary forms of populist policies from the Right, while raising the minimum wage or giving more power to worker unions are examples of Leftist populist policies.

It should be noted that these policies do not need to actually be beneficial to the working classes, nor that being populist inherently means they’re harmful either. It is simply a label for any policy, good or bad that aims to appeal to the lower classes. The issue here, however is the mythos.

As it has resulted in the cult-like mentality that as long as the correct person is voted into power (Donald Trump being the best known example of this) victory is assured, as well as a distorted view of democracy.

The populist mythology was effective at the time, but was also simplistic and overly black and white. This is nothing new, it is in fact a historical norm for any successful narrative; the problem is that this time around there were no checks and balances within the Right that could mitigate the negative effects of the current party narrative.

This is usually done by having a well established elite that understands the shortcomings of the narrative, and knows which of the newer recruits to select for or filter out of the upper parts of the party hierarchy.
The checks and balances were not present this time around, however, and now the Right has a lot of people believing their own propaganda way too far up in the party.

The results of believing too much in the populist narrative in question have been overly naïve views on not just democracy but a genuine belief that there is a right side of history, that there will be a permanent victory over the forces of evil (the left), and that democracy unhindered and without interference will always move towards the side of the party that is on to the right side of history. At its core this is a surprisingly leftist and revolutionary way of thinking. Combined with a characteristically Protestant Christian form of moral prudence.

Since all actions are filtered through the lens of right vs wrong side of history, even the most benign attempt to persuade public opinion towards the right must be stomped out, with much more extreme prejudice than they’d display to even the most sadistically violent Antifa member, as long as it in any way is perceived as ”rude” or ”indecent” or a ”danger to Our Democracy”

What’s more, the criteria for what is ”immoral” is barely even dictated by anyone on their own side, but more often whatever far left propaganda manages to bubble up through the legacy media. In practice this means the Left can declare any rules of engagement they feel like, and no matter how ludicrous they are, no matter how obvious it is they themselves don’t take said rules seriously, the Right will enforce them upon their own and solely their own with unparalleled religious zeal.

It doesn’t matter that the Right themselves are aware that said propagandists are merely trying to manipulate them, nor does it matter what consequences following said propaganda will bring. As long as it touches their ideological blind spot of recoiling from anything and everything that is not pristine and principled, they will instinctively jump on the opportunity to throw as many spanners in the works of what any sane man would call their party fellows, until they have returned the Right to its state of ”principled conservatism on the side of democracy”. Which almost always is identical to a state of stagnant ineptitude.

Much of the Right’s current miserable situation is as a direct result of this segment. And as much as I hope dearly that at least some of these people will realize how wrong they were in following the ”will of the people”, now that the populace is kissing the hand of what they perceive as totalitarians on the wrong side of history, I honestly fear they’re too emotionally invested in their ideological framing for anything to convince them.

While it is impossible to have a political party without these people – just as it is impossible to be without any other form of narrative in an organization, too many of them have moved far too near the core of the organized right in far too many western countries. If the Right wants to regain its footing, it is to push it’s populist tendencies back out into the peripheries and ensure it’s core is more in tune with reality.

If the right instead chooses to preserve its delusional aspirations of sainthood it will experience the same filtering out and discarding at the hands of cruel nature as any other entities that proved unfit for their environment throughout life’s evolution on this earth.

One of the recurring themes thrown around by those questioning the efficacy of sanctions against the Russian Federation is the postulate that the Russian Rouble is at its all time high. The slightly more informed ones nuance things and say that the Rouble is at its 5-year high (which is also closer to the truth). Tucker Carlson claimed yesterday that the Rouble hit a 7-year high (timestamped link) but even that is also a debatable claim.

7 years ago $1 would buy 50 roubles. Today it buys 60 roubles. So on a 7 year trend, the rouble is in fact worth 20% less.

The evolution of the Rouble, their argument goes, shows not only the inefficacy of sanctions, but it also allegedly proves that it’s making Russia stronger. But is that true?

Now, there is a lot to discuss about the sanctions regime – and certainly some of the sanctions are outright useless or ill-conceived – but the point about the exchange rate is a non-sequitur. The answer to the point “the RUB is at an all-time/5-years/whatever-lengh-of-time high” is “So what?”. The nominal value of the exchange rate is only a minuscule part of the story and is rarely a relevant one.

Some comparisons

If the argument had been true – that a higher exchange rate means a stronger economy for that country – then that would necessarily imply for everyone to believe that Somalia is at its best economically over the last 17 years.

But is that the case? Well, not really. Somalia’s economy is mostly stagnating – and has been mostly stagnating for most of the last 20 years with a brief exception in 2014-15.

Of course, there are multiple explanations for this. The locust infestation, the floods, the inevitable imports of inflation and a few other local and regional crises that have hit Somalia over the last 5 years explain this phenomenon really well (in addition to the historical baggage that the country is carrying).

But if the exchange rate had been an important part of the story, then the economic situation in Somalia should’ve improved instead of worsening. But it didn’t because the exchange rate is a poor proxy for measuring the economic strength of a country – be it Russia or Somalia.

My argument stands even when looking at more developed and wealthier countries.

The Israeli New Shekel, for instance, has a higher exchange rate against the dollar today than it had in 2016. Yet the economic growth (and the corresponding level of prosperity) of Israel has, at best, a light correlation with the exchange rate. Heck, Israel had over the last 15 years some years in which it recorded economic growth yet a negative annual change for the same year.

If the story Tucker Carlson and others are telling had been true, and a good exchange rate and GDP growth meant increase in prosperity and economic strength of the country, then that would’ve been easily noticeable in most countries throughout the data at least over the last 20 years. But it’s not.

On capital controls

Capital control represents any measure taken by a government, central bank, or other regulatory body to limit the flow of foreign capital in and/or out of the domestic economy. These controls include taxes, tariffs, legislation, volume restrictions and a whole plethora of other measures.

Ever since the start of the war in Ukraine, the Russian Central Bank imposed quite a few capital control measures: it banned Russian companies from sending their funds overseas (measure somewhat softened in June), introduced a mandatory rule for export-oriented companies to sell as much as 80% of their forex revenues at home (later the threshold was lowered to 50% but the measure overall still stands) and made it very difficult for regular Russians to buy physical US dollars or Euros even at a loss (which led to the street exchange rate to skyrocket – something unseen since the old Soviet days). Most of these were adopted even before any Western-led economic sanctions had been adopted.

In practice, this means that a Russian citizen or resident cannot take advantage of this “good exchange rate” in any meaningful way. In other words: the Russian Rouble may be at its “best moment in X years”, as the story goes, but nobody can meaningfully confirm that in practice because it’s illegal and nearly impossible to do so.

Russia is not the first (nor the last) to find itself in such situation. Iceland for instance introduced similar capital control measures in 2008 to prevent capital flight and a total meltdown of its economy. Those measures were only lifted in 2017 with mixed results. Just like Russia, Iceland stayed out of the international financial markets for years as investors (rightfully) regarded the Icelandic banking sector and the krona as untrustworthy.

When the capital control measures were lifted, the krona had the highest exchange rate in years (just like the rouble has now), yet the country got much wealthier in the years that followed the lifting of capital controls even though that also led to a negative trend in the exchange rate.

This also makes sense intuitively. For most people in any country (except for some exporters) it is preferable for hard foreign currency (USD, EUR, etc.) to be cheaper rather than more expensive. This is even more important for people in countries where so many of the necessary goods are denominated in a foreign currency (usually USD or EUR) – which is a situation in which most of the world (Russia included) finds itself in.

Convertible currencies and other factors

To an extent, all currencies are subjected to capital controls and other restrictions. But some (a lot) less so than others.

Currencies subjected to the least amount of controls and restrictions are called convertible currencies because they can be easily bought or sold on the foreign exchange market with little to no restrictions. A convertible currency is a highly liquid instrument (and thus more desirable) than a currency that is tightly controlled by a central bank.

That’s why people allover the world hoard $100 bills a lot more than €500 notes (which the EU is trying to abolish) or the 1000 Emirati dirham bill. The US dollar, for all its faults, is convertible. Of course, this is a matter of trust and historic precedent. But people around the world trust the US dollar so much that the $100 bill routinely tops the charts as one of the best American exports.

World currencies are divided between convertible, partially convertible and non-convertible. The Swiss Franc, the Euro, the US Dollar, the British Pund Sterling, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish kroner, the Canadian dollar, Emirati Dirham and the Australian dollar are the most well-known convertible currencies. But on this small list there are a few lesser-known members such as the Kenyan Shilling, the Singaporean dollar, the Saudi Arabian Riyal or the South African Rand. In fact, in some countries of Africa (that are not South Africa) you may end up in a bit of a shock when the ATM may cough up South African Rands instead of the local currency. That is possible because the local banks and the people trust the Rand to be interchangeable and liquid all the time including and especially against the local currency (e.g. Namibian dollar).

The partially convertible currencies are those that are liquid enough to be changed in some places but not easily on the foreign exchange market. The Kyrgyz Som, the Polish Złoty, the Romanian Leu or the Turkish Lira are some examples of currencies in this category.

The non-convertible currencies are, really, the majority of the currencies in the world. Russian Rouble, Kazakh Tenge, Tunisian Dinar, Uzbek Sumy, the Ukrainian Hrivnya and so many others are in the category of currencies that if you’re caught holding, you’ll be in a very difficult position should you will try to exchange them into something else without physically going into the place/country where they are in circulation (and sometimes not even then – as it’s the case with Tunisia or Russia).

That’s why my 160,000 Uzbek so’m/sumy leftover from my visit there are nearly impossible to change outside Uzbekistan – because the so’m, in addition to being inflationary in ways the US dollar isn’t, is not even partially convertible. Not even banks in the neighboring countries accept them. People traveling from Uzbekistan to neighboring Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan carry US dollar $20 and $100 notes with them.

Of course, there are degrees here too. The non-convertible Kazakh Tenge is a bit “more convertible” than the Tunisian Dinar and they are both more convertible than the North Korean won. But the point is that non-convertible currencies are not only less liquid, but they’re also less reliable (since their regulation regime is more likely to change overnight or with little notice than convertible ones) and, most importantly, information about them is routinely less relevant.

The Russian Rouble, being non-convertible, coupled with the “temporary” capital controls is one of the currencies whose nominal exchange rate is even less corroborated with the real world.

This has happened to Russia in the past too. In the 1980s, the official rate was 1 Soviet rouble (SUR) for 1.35 US Dollars (or 74 копейки/kopeks for $1). The capital control regime was even tighter than now. Once those controls were lifted, in 1988, the exchange rate moved from 0.74SUR for a dollar to 100SUR in under four years. And that was the official rate. On the streets (the only free market) the Soviet Rouble would trade for as much as 500 roubles for a US Dollar.

The lesson here is this: The exchange rate’s importance in the story of the economy of a country varies by the status of the currency. The more convertible a currency is, the more important its exchange rate is. And the less convertible a currency is (as it’s the case with the Russian Rouble), the less important its exchange rate is.

We can (and indeed should) discuss the role of sanctions in the West’s response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine – but the value of the Russian Rouble as communicated by the Russian Central Bank is simply not an argument in this discussion.

We can (and indeed should) discuss the effect of sanctions (both on Russia and on the West itself) but touting the exchange rate of the Rouble does nothing to advance the argument in any direction. It merely distracts attention from more relevant aspects and, in the end, wastes everyone’s time.

So… the President of the United States told you to be concerned about monkeypox. But not as concerned as for the Wuhan Cough. But still quite concerned.

While the Wuhan Virus was in some ways a bit different (though not really too different from the other respiratory pathogens we humans encountered in the recent past), the monkeypox is known for over 60 years. And, in fact, the corporate media has been stirring panic over it multiple times over the last 20 years or so.

But before we get to history, please take a quick look at the little document below:

So, the reason both the President of the USA and the skeptic/alternative media are talking about this is because someone’s been nasty in public with the monkeypox yet again (yes, this also happened in the past too). And it’s not just any random somebody – but exactly the Wuhan Virology Institute, you know, kinda sort of the source of the Wuhan Flu which is still being used by various countries (including and especially the People’s Republic of China) to suppress civil liberties.

Stunning. Wuhan Lab was Experimenting with Monkeypox Last Year – Published Research Report in International Journal in February

EXC: The Infamous Wuhan Lab Recently Assembled Monkeypox Strains Using Methods Flagged For Creating ‘Contagious Pathogens’.

History time

However, unlike the Wuhan Coronavirus, the monkeypox has decades of literature behind it and also multiple attempts by media or governments (assuming the two entities are separate) to turning it into a panic.

Remember the monkeypox panic of December 2019? https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-50659118

Or the monkeypox panic of 1997? https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/monkeypox-changes-its-pattern-human-infection

How about the monkeypox from 2018? https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/2163854/rare-monkeypox-virus-sickens-two-britain-after-they-separately

Or the monkeypox panic of 2017?

Or the panic from 2010? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pox-swap-30-years-after-small-pox-monkey-pox-on-the-rise/

Friendly reminder that monkeypox has been around for exactly 65 years already.

In fact, every year there are quite a few cases of monkeypox outside of the endemic area of Africa
Here’s a story from 2019 with a similar outbreak like the one in 2022: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/faq-what-you-should-know-about-monkeypox-877391

Here’s a 2017 story from WashPo on how monkeypox has been studied:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/11/14/how-we-got-the-story-about-monkeypox/ [tl;dr: places in the middle of fucking nowhere, accessible only by UN boats and where electricity doesn’t exist.]

2010 story from National Geographic about the connection between ending the smallpox vaccination programme and monkeypox: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/goodbye-smallpox-vaccination-hello-monkeypox

Very serious outbreak of monkeypox occurred in the USA in 2003. Here’s a 2004 study about it: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa032299

Nigeria has routine monkeypox outbreaks. There’s even Interim National Guidelines released once-a-decade on how to respond to outbreaks. Here’s the most recent one available [2017]: https://ncdc.gov.ng/themes/common/docs/protocols/50_1508912430.pdf

Occasionally the disease spills over in countries around Nigeria.
For instance in 2018, Liberia was hit quite harshly: http://outbreaknewstoday.com/monkeypox-confirmed-liberia-57035/

It will not be the first time humans are being stupid in public over monkeypox.
For instance in 2012 the CDC/US Feds quarantined a Delta flight over fears of monkeypox.

It was… bed bugs.

Here’s a 2010 story about monkeypox in Zaire/DR Congo and why the disease didn’t just die off as the eXpErTs had expected:

Just yesterday, in Romania, a doctor that has been making waves over his “warnings” of monkeypox allegedly found at his hospital… had to be taken to the loony bin after he beat up a patient and two nurses, and then tried to drive a garbage truck. You see… viral panics attract the looniest members of society.

Well, similar things happened in Britain in 2018. Most of the tabloid press and other media took it upon themselves to warn the public about the looming danger(s) of the monkeypox. Rumours of “hundreds” of “cases” spread like wildfire (and, just like with Covid or with monkeypox today, no clear definition of what a “case” means was offered). In reality, there had been exactly… two cases. Both discussed at length in this paper: https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2018.23.38.1800509 (please notice the quality and the precision of clinical data – the opposite of what was and still is the case with Covid19)

Soon after, the British press mostly deleted their panicard BS. In 2019, here’s how the issue was being framed: https://news.sky.com/story/rare-case-of-monkeypox-diagnosed-in-england-11877851

Here’s a 2016 story of the very serious monkeypox outbreak in DR Congo:

BS stories about monkeypox aren’t a new phenomenon at all. Nor an exclusive purview of the West.

Here’s the health minister in Malaysia in 2019, exasperated by the media’s exaggerations of the monkeypox (which at the time hadn’t even been detected in his country):

The United States suffered through an outbreak of monkeypox 19 years ago, in the year 2003. Here’s how the CDC was describing the situation in the middle of the outbreak:

As of July 8, 2003, a total of 71 cases of monkeypox have been reported to CDC from Wisconsin (39), Indiana (16), Illinois (12), Missouri (two), Kansas (one), and Ohio (one); these include 35 (49%) cases laboratory-confirmed at CDC and 36 (51%) suspect and probable cases under investigation by state and local health departments

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5227a5.htm

Here’s how the 2003 outbreak was described in a paper from 2006 (remember that any outbreak is better analyzed at its end, rather than in the middle of it – because cooler heads can prevail and emotion/panic doesn’t run as high):

In May and June 2003, public health officials identified an outbreak of human monkeypox in the United States. This was the first instance of human monkeypox virus (MPXV) infection detected outside its endemic range in Africa. As of July 30, 2003, a total of 72 human cases had been reported. Thirty-seven (51%) cases were eventually laboratory confirmed, and 35 met the case definition set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Among the 35 patients whose cases were laboratory confirmed before July 11, 2003, 32 (91%) tested positive for MPXV by PCR, culture, immunohistochemical testing, or electron microscopy of skin lesions; 2 tested positive by PCR and/or culture of an oropharyngeal or nasopharyngeal swab; and 1 tested positive by PCR and culture of a lymph node aspirate. To date, no new animal or human cases have been reported.

The outbreak was relatively large compared with most reported events in Africa, but clinical features were milder than typically seen there. No human deaths occurred, although 2 children required intensive care. One patient received a corneal transplant due to chronic ocular infection.

Paper from 2006: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291353/

Please notice that PCR tests were a thing then too. Though, unlike 2020/21/22, they weren’t used randomly on the general population – which allowed for a much more precise use. And even so, the PCR test was still rather useless as a diagnostic tool. Back in those days, diseases were counted by clinical diagnosis. The good ol’ days…

Anyway, “your pets are a danger” is also not a new narrative.

Here’s a cached document by New York Health authorities from almost 20 years ago where the potential connections between pets and monkeypox are laid out: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zhaaRE7w7ZgJ:www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/zoonoses/monkeypox/docs/petownerfacts.pdf+&cd=18&hl=ro&ct=clnk&gl=us

REEEEEE be afraid!
Here’s sCiEnTiSts and eXpErTs peddling panicard BS 14 years ago about monkeypox: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0800589105

There was a time when the mainstream Left was equally skeptical of the public health establishment and Big Pharma as the Right.
Here’s an article about monkeypox in The Guardian from 2003: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jun/12/thisweekssciencequestions -> Notice that the possibility of it spreading wildly through humans is treated with a shrug, precisely because the disease itself is pretty mild (and infection-acquired immunity is lifelong and sterilizing, by the way).

Experiments on and with monkeypox in aerosolized form (in theory more transmissible – tho not necessarily in practice) aren’t new either.
Here’s a paper from 2001 discussing such an experiment: https://www.nature.com/articles/3780373

Here’s some more panicard sCiEnCe from 2010, funded by NIAD (read: Anthony Faucci) – https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=827

And, finally, here’s a review of both experimental and natural infections of animals with monkeypox from 1958 to 2012: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3635111/

Conclusions

So… does all of this mean that this time ’round there won’t be a general(ized) panic about the monkeypox even though it’s the third or fourth semi-serious transnational outbreak just this century? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

“People are not stupid, people are fucking stupid” – is a reality that the powers that be know all too well. Additionally, unlike 2001, 2003, 2010 and 2019, people are significantly stupider today. Or, at the very least, the stupidity of the general public is far more evident today than it was at the turn of the century. With this fact in mind, do expect authorities in at least some countries to be supremely stupid in public.

Remember that in 2009, a few countries did go into lockdown over a very mild flu. And highly advanced countries at some point in time were very proud of spreading DDT everywhere in order to fight child paralysis. In fact, they were proud of it:

The point that I’m making is that the ability and willingness of the Trust the Science™ crowd to endorse policies that amount to being supremely stupid in public is not a new phenomenon. It did not start with Covid19 and there is no reason for it not to be manifested during this outbreak of monkeypox.

The purpose of this article is to equip you with the knowledge that this movie has been seen before. Monkeypox experiments (including dubious lab experiments), media panic over it, dubious policies meant to “protect” but in fact did only harm, dubious NPIs being deployed, very fake news spreading like wildfire… all of those happened multiple times just in the last 20 years. And the world didn’t end under a pile of monkeypox rashes. It won’t this time either.

Also, it is true that the smallpox vaccine protects (because, unlike the myocarditis-inducing experimental gene therapy clotshots of 2020, it actually is a vaccine). It is also true that infection-acquired immunity is lifelong and sterilizing.

Also, while it makes for good memes, monkeypox is not like HIV (Gay-related immune deficiency – GRID) in the sense that it’s not an STD per se. It’s still funny though to watch/read concocted double speak like “individuals who self-identify as gay or bi-sexual as well as other communities of men who have sex with other men” – because, you see, “homosexuals” is just not hip enough anymore.

That’s it for now. Don’t panic. Grab popcorn. And enjoy the shitshow.

During times of crisis (any crisis – be it war, pandemics, accidents, PR mess, politico-sexual scandals, you name it) the first thing you need to do is to get ahead of the story. Get your version of the story as fast as possible before the enemy gets to deploy a spin on it.

Since Putin rolled in the tanks in Ukraine, the West has done a decent enough job at staying ahead of the story. As cynical as this may sound to some ears, the informational (read: propaganda) aspect of the war is routinely more important or at least equally important to the operational aspect. In other words: the actual victory on the field may not matter at all if you lose the propaganda dispute. The Vietnam War is a prime example on how you can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory because the propaganda was neglected.

Up until about 7 days ago the main lines of attack by the Russian propaganda fell flat outright. Those lines being:

• muh Azov battalion
• muh oppression of Russians by the Ukrainians
• muh Nazis
• muh denazification of the Jewish-led Ukrainian government 🤡

Nobody seriously believed any of these. And the first two elements have been pushed by various agents of Russian disinformation for 8 years now. And they convinced roughly nobody. Which goes to show that even Russian propagandists aren’t what they used to be. Basic rules of propaganda say that you have to withdraw a talking point after a while, especially if it’s clearly unsuccessful.

Muh biolabs

But then the russkies came up with a (not exactly) new talking point: The existence of US-assisted biolabs in Ukraine.

Even this talking point isn’t particularly new. Here’s for instance Russian state agency TASS discussing this talking point in April 2020. Here is the Chinese official propaganda tabloid amplifying this in April 2021. Here is Russian state media Rossya24 discussing this in 2018 – except at that time they were also alleging a similar thing about Georgia as well because, hey, the Russian invasion in Georgia had to be justified somehow. In fact, the “biolabs in Georgia” claim was used again in May 2020 in conjunction with the Wuhan Flu panic (and they added Kazakhstan into the mix too for extra credibility).

The point being this: “Muh biolabs” is not a new line of attack by Russian disinformation. It’s been around for at least 4 years and it’s not related to either the war in Ukraine or the CCP virus pandemic.

Why did it work this time ’round?

Having established that none of this is exactly new, it is still clear that this time around the line of attack worked much better than in the previous attempts. The reasons are simple: the West not only has stupider people in its leadership, but also significantly more corrupt people.

In 2018 and 2020, this line of attack was not ignored and countered immediately with on-site interviews, transparent footage and re-publishing of the relevant treaties.

This time ’round, however, the Western establishment chose the worst possible approach – namely to deny the very existence of these labs and call everyone who disagrees a Putinist. Congratulations Western establishment! The real Putinists and their friends are grateful!

Those who wish to promote this talking point (either on behalf of Russia or simply because they despise the current Western establishment) now have all the weapons they need to spin as many conspiracy theories as they please using “the customer’s material” – namely official Western sources.

Leaving aside the fog around Victoria “fuck the EU” Nulland’s speech, the existence of these labs has been public information since at least 2005 when a relevant treaty was signed. Prior to the signing of the treaty, two US Senators – Republican Richard Lugar and Democrat Barack Hussein Obama (remember him?) alongside a team of CDC and other pharma people inspected the sites. And Russia knew about it. In fact, the Russian government (Putin’s government!) officially apologized in 2005 for pulling some shenanigans arouns Lugar and Obama’s plane. None of this is (or ever was) secret. The fricking Chicago Tribune wrote about it for crying out loud!

With these undeniable facts on the table, anyone can concoct any conspiracy theory he or she wants. Sure, most would be implausible for those who haven’t heard about Ukraine this morning. But most people – including most of those who now do performative #StandWithUkraine support on social media – have quite literally heard about Ukraine this morning. That crop of people is easily subvertible and dissuadable by a well-written story starting from the facts laid out even by the establishment’s tools such as Politifact.

And let us not forget the backdrop of all of this: Both Western societies and Russian society are just coming out of a pandemic that was rife with disinformation including, and especially, from the public health establishments and governments. That means both the Russian public and the Western public is primed to believing any story pertaining to the dangers of lab-leaked pathogens – in part because the public has already seen this movie before.

Friendly reminder: The establishment was very quick to deny that the CCP Virus got leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even though that distinct possibility wasn’t refuted even partially to this day.

So, from a propaganda perspective, thanks to Western incompetence and, yes, corruption, this old line of attack by Russia’s disinformation machine has gotten new and improved teeth.

What does this mean and what can be done?

So for the next several weeks, expect a lot more stories carefully planted in as many newspapers as possible and carefully written in such a way as to keep you in both fear and doubt.

The purpose of this line of attack isn’t to reveal Western corruption (few people even care about that to begin with – Russians included). Nor is it to distract your attention from the mass murder that Russia is committing in Ukraine – even though it may seem like that.

The purpose of this line of attack is to stoke new fears into a [Western and Russian] public already stressed by pandemic fatigue and to make the Western public doubt the USA. The occupant is relying on the fact that the public is already aware of the mountains of lies perpetrated by the so-called “public health” establishment during the pandemic. Of course, nobody will tell you that the Russian “public health” establishment was just as HONK if not even more so as the Canadian, German or Italian one.

What you can do – in addition to always telling the truth – is to recognize that you don’t have to suck Putin’s dick in order to own the libs.

The DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency) is real and it assists laboratories in Ukraine. This is neither a nothingburger nor a catastrophe. Since this is a war, completely trusting an interested source right now is detrimental. Which is why I only presented documents that predate this war. And that’s also what you should do as well if you want to do something.

There will be new “revelations” – must of them bullshit, some of them true. Sifting through them will be a challenge. Just make sure you don’t keep a mind so open that your brains fall over.

With that said, though, we should recognize that this is the first serious blunder of the West on the propaganda front. And it’s a costly blunder. Oh well… 🤷🏻‍♂️

Keep calm and Slava Ukrayini!