Month: June 2023

Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Fear and Loathing in the City of Westminster

Our descent into City Airport was like the drop-ship scene in the movie Aliens. The BA CityFlyer Embraer 190, a narrow-body twin-engine airliner, rolled over into a 40-degree bank and started bucking like a mechanical bull. Simulated “chimes” began chiming frantically. Flight attendants bolted for their seats. The German businessman in the seat beside me, obviously a nervous flyer, immediately adopted the “brace” position. I gripped his shoulder reassuringly and shouted into his ear like a drunken redneck, “WE’RE ON AN EXPRESS ELEVATOR TO HELL! GOING DOWN!”

And so began my latest trip to London. This time, I wasn’t there to talk to “the Left” or to hunt down endoparasitoid xenomorphs. I was there on Serious Conspiracy Theorist Business, which I explained to the chirpy MI6 operative posing as a “survey taker” that followed me out of Border Control asking questions about my “nation of residence” and my “experience with the passport scanners,” and so on. She was wearing one of those rubber “Mission Impossible” masks that made her look like a middle-aged British woman. I waited for an opportunity, head faked, juked right, and lost her in the crowd. As I entered the “Arrivals” lobby, I turned and shouted in her general direction, “NOT MY FIRST RODEO, MR. PHELPS!”

I don’t know what was up with all the shouting. I’ve been experimenting with different types of medication for this sinus condition I’ve had for months. My Sinus Specialist diagnosed me with “long” or possibly “permanent Covid,” or some yet-to-be-named debilitating syndrome caused by some other bio-weapon that produces cold-and-flu-like symptoms and has a survival rate of 99.8 percent. So, maybe it was bad reaction to my meds. Whatever it was, I was feeling jumpy.

And the climate-change apocalypse didn’t help. Emerging from the Tube in Westminster was like walking into an enormous open-air sauna. Bodies were lying all around on the sidewalks. AFP photographers in hazmat suits were taking pictures of the carnage. Herds of corpulent American tourists staggered through the streets in semi-fugue states sweating profusely and thumbing their phones like an invasion of alien albino hippos trying to call up to their UAPs and arrange for immediate emergency extraction. I pushed and shoved and elbowed my way down Tothill Street to my pod hotel, checked in, and proceeded to get hopelessly lost in the maze of identical Kubrickian hallways that eventually led me to my luxury pod, and cleaned myself up for the night’s festivities.

What was I doing back in London in the middle of a heat wave? Well … OK, I’m allowed to tell you about it now. As you are probably aware, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand were doing this public event last Thursday …

… but that’s not what I was really there for.

Not that the Thursday event wasn’t fun. It was. Despite the rather pricey tickets, there was a good size house and spirits were high. Russell Brand was in top form, pouring out torrents of intellectual free-association like an English Neal Cassady and nailing the punchlines of all the jokes. Michael was also firing on all cylinders. He worked the house like a seasoned politician, whipping the crowd into a veritable frenzy of anti-totalitarian fervor. Stella Assange took the stage at one point and briefed us on the official crucifixion of her husband, which, sadly, now looks like a fait accompli. Matt, who had just made it to London that morning, and so was jet-lagged and delieriously sleep-deprived, dispensed with the speech he had rewritten on the plane, and just winged it, and somehow pulled it off … because that, as they say, is show biz.

Here’s the money part of Matt’s speech, which he paraphrased in London (emphasis mine):

“What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.“

Early the next morning, Michael, Matt, and a secret cabal of international journalists, editors, organizers, political satirists, academics, and other Very Serious People whose names I am not at liberty to mention gathered in an undisclosed location and spent the better part of the day sharing harmful misinformation and strategizing about how to defeat (or marginally disrupt) the network of governments, Intelligence agencies, global corporations, NGOs, and so-called disinformation experts known as the Censorship Industrial Complex. There were delegates from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and other nominally sovereign countries.

This heretofore clandestine meeting was conducted in what appeared to be a WWII-era air-raid shelter that had been converted into a private BDSM club under military-level OPSEC protocols (i.e., the meeting was conducted according to the protocols, not the architectural conversion). I’m not entirely sure why that was. We weren’t doing anything even remotely illegal. However, given that I’m under criminal investigation here in Germany for tweeting the cover art of my book, and the IRS’s sudden interest in Matt, and Kit Klarenberg’s recent experience in Luton, perhaps the abundance of caution was warranted. The last thing we needed was the UK Thoughtpolice goose-stepping in like Basil Fawlty and dragging everyone off to Room 101.

Anyway, that’s what I was actually there for. I had never met most of the people in attendance, except online on the double-encrypted Russian-backed dark-web conspiracy-theorist channels where we hatch our right-wing-extremist plots to defend people’s rights to freedom-of-speech and engage in other harmful anti-Democracy behaviors. I’m still not sure who I actually met in London, as we were all wearing identical Mickey-Mouse masks and speaking through portable voice modifiers. (In any secret meeting like this, you have to assume you’ve been infiltrated!)

After the obligatory arguing about the agenda, we settled in and shared our country reports, which, unsurprisingly, were all variations on a theme. I won’t go into all the details. Michael Shellenberger’s non-profit has been tracking those developments. Matt Taibbi and Racket News are reporting it. Other alternative media outlets are reporting it. Millions of people all around the world are talking about it, writing about it, and arguing with each other about it. Your Twitter feed is probably full of it. Alex Gutentag just published a huge article about it.

So, what is it, exactly, that is going on?

The thing that was horrifying about listening to my colleagues reporting on the state of things in their countries — or, rather, the thing that should be horrifying but is becoming a mundane fact of life — is that more or less the same totalitarian program is being rolled out in countries throughout the world.

• The censorship.

• The official propaganda.

• The criminalization of dissent.

• The pathologization of dissent.

• The manipulation of our perception of reality.

• The coordinated transformation of the world into a smiley-faced neo-Orwellian police state in which politics no longer matters because society has been divided into two basic classes, i.e., “the normals,” who are prepared to mindlessly follow orders and parrot whatever official propaganda they are fed, and “the deviants,” or “extremists,” who are not.

Seriously, all satire aside, think about the implications of that.

As you sit there in whichever nominally sovereign country you’re sitting there reading this in, ask yourself, “how and why is this happening?” Then ask yourself, “why is it happening now?”

If you do not have answers to those questions, it might behoove you to attempt to come up with some. That is basically what I’ve been trying to do — in a satirical and sometimes not so satirical manner — in these Consent Factory essays for the last seven years. I’m not going to summarize it all again here. I’ve done that, repeatedly, in my essays and books. I did it the last time I visited London to give a talk at the Real Left Conference.

I did it again at this gathering in London. It did not go over all that well.

The thing is, most of us are so laser-focused on the trees that we cannot see the forest. But our adversaries see the forest. They see the forest like fucking eagles. They own the fucking forest and everything in it. While we hop like squirrels from tree to tree, distracted from distraction by distraction, from limited hangout by limited hangout, they are building a big fucking fence around it and deploying the Forest-Ranger Sturmabteilung.

I’m reminded of that infamous Karl Rove quote. He was referring to the USA, of course, but it was GloboCap (i.e., the Corporatocracy) that he was really speaking for whether he knew it or not …

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore … we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” [The New York Times Magazine]

If we do not want to end up “studying that reality,” the global, pathologized-totalitarian reality that is being subtly and not so subtly implemented simultaneously in countries throughout the world, at some point we had better come up with some actual answers to those questions above.

The supranational, globally-hegemonic, post-ideological system of power that runs our world — whatever you need to call it — has answers to those questions. It has a story. It is a story about a beneficent global empire governed by authoritative scientific experts who are trying to save the world from Whatever and protect everyone from “disinformation” and “harmful” speech, ideas, and so on. Like every good story, it has an antagonist. Us. We are the official enemy. Right, Left, libertarian, anarchist, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist … it does not make one iota of difference. There is only the Empire, and those who oppose it. The Empire does not give a shit why. It is conducting a global “Clear-and-Hold” operation, wiping out internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity. It could not care less what you think you believe in. All it wants is mindless obedience and rote repetition of its propaganda. That’s how totalitarianism works.

And there I go with my story again. If anyone has a different story that makes sense of the last seven years — and arguably the last 30 years — honestly, I would love to hear it. My story fills me with fear and loathing, but the only other coherent story I’m hearing at the moment is the Empire’s story, and I think we all know how that one ends.

The US Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration approved the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s congestion tax scheme to charge drivers entering New York City’s midtown Manhattan. The tax is the first of its kind in the nation, expected to fleece hardworking Americans between $9 and $23 per day to drive through the district, reported Bloomberg. 

“Congestion pricing will reduce traffic in our crowded downtown, improve air quality and provide critical resources to the MTA,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul. 

Hochul said, “I am proud of the thorough environmental assessment process we conducted, including responding to thousands of comments from community members from across the region.”

She added: “With the green light from the federal government, we look forward to moving ahead with the implementation of this program.” 

The MTA operates NYC’s subways, buses, and rail lines. It’ll be responsible for implementing the tax scheme as soon as April 2024. Bloomberg said motorists driving south of 60th Street would be able to use an E-ZPass. 

The new tax aims to fleece motorists and raise $1 billion of new annual revenue for the MTA. NYC officials want to reduce the number of daily vehicles entering the district by up to 20%.

Meanwhile, in a joint statement from Rep. Josh Gottheimer, Sen. Bob Menendez, and Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr.—all Democrats, they said, “This is nothing more than a cash grab to fund the MTA.” 

The new tax will put a paywall around the elite financial district and bar lower-income motorists from entering because of the cost of entry. 

Via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Jim Caviezel, a Christian actor of “The Passion of the Christ” fame, said he wants his upcoming thriller “Sound of Freedom” to shed light on the reality of child sex trafficking in the United States and warn parents of what he called a “pedophile agenda” that has been pushed for decades.

The film stars Caviezel as Tim Ballard, a Homeland Security agent who, after rescuing a young boy from traffickers, learns that the boy’s sister is still captive. He quits his job and puts his life at risk as he embarks on a mission deep into the jungle of Colombia to save the girl.

In an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” Caviezel and the real Tim Ballard said what the film depicts, as dark and disturbing as it may be, is based on real events and people.

“I will say, it is a true story, absolutely,” Caviezel told host Jan Jekielek. “Every character is real. Every bad guy is real.”

“At the end of the film … it showed all the good guys, the bad guys, the kids, and it said where they are today,” said Ballard. “We know where they are. Those are real kids, every one of them. Some of them work for us. Some of them have actually rescued people from human trafficking as young adults.”

In 2013, Ballard left his government job to found Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), a non-profit organization working with law enforcement around the world to rescue children from exploitation and help survivors recover. They have been operating in places where instability and conflict make women and children more vulnerable to trafficking, including countries like Ecuador, Mexico, and Ukraine.

Tragically, according to OUR, the kidnapping and sexual exploitation of children in those countries is being fueled and propelled by a growing U.S. customer base.

“The big numbers: $150 billion a year are made off the backs of men, women, and children as slaves,” Ballard said, noting that some 27 million people around the world live in slavery, with 6 million of those being children.

“It’s estimated that 2 million of those [children] are specifically designated for the commercial sex trade,” the former federal agent continued. “The United States is number three for destination countries for human trafficking, number one the consumption of child rape videos, and we are now approaching number one in production of child exploitation material.”

‘A Huge Weapon Against the Evil’

In 2019, Ballard testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, arguing that an expanded, strengthened U.S.–Mexico border barrier provides an “effective tool” in combating those trying to smuggle children into the country for the purposes of selling them for sex. He now believes that the countries’ poor border enforcement might be part of a broader agenda catering to this lucrative market.

“Why are there over 85,000 unaccompanied minors showing up in the last two years at the southern border and are delivered to sponsors with no background check, no DNA testing?” he said. “Thousands of these kids … showing up alone with a name: ‘Call this number, please, and take me to my sponsor.’ They call the number and they show up.”

“The fake news media outlets are also propelling this agenda that don’t call them pedophiles. They want to call it minor attracted persons, or MAP,” he added. “Sexualizing kids, giving kids right to consent, pushing God out of education—all the platforms the organized pedophile groups have been peddling, the woke left is now implementing them.”

For parents and concerned Americans, Caviezel said his film will help them better understand the reality and what they need to do to protect their loved ones.

“The film is very powerful because it shows you how routinely [child sex trafficking] occurs,” he told Jekielek. “But it also helps you. It weaponizes you to know what the warning signs are. A mother and a father have to guard their children and protect them. And by sticking your head in the sand is not protecting your children.”

“When you walk out of there, you won’t get up just like you did on ‘The Passion of the Christ’ or on ‘Schindler’s List,’” the actor added. “And the difference between ‘Schindler’s List’ and this film, is that ‘Schindler’s List’ was 50 years too late. We’re doing this right now during the time. And this is a huge weapon against the evil.”

Read more here…

While things such as daylight savings time, skipping breakfast, skyrocketing energy bills and making the bed ‘too vigorously’ have been floated as causes for heart attack and strokes (and totally nothing else), you can now add ‘exercising too hard’ to the list.

According to a new study in the Physics of Fluid, researchers concluded that an elevated heart rate can cause strokes in people with blocked carotid arteries, which occurs through a process of stenosis – where the carotid arteries located on both sides of the neck become clogged with fat an cholesterol, forming a plaque that narrows the artery.

The NY Post reports that stenosis can be difficult to catch early, and is dangerous because it limits blood flow to the brain, which can result in a stroke.

And according to the Cleveland Clinic, some 16.5 million (5%) of Americans have carotid artery stenosis.

Contributing factors to stenosis include smoking, obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure or cholesterol, or diabetes.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur used a computational model to simulate blood flow in carotid arteries at three stages of stenosis: without blockage, with a mild 30% blockage and with a moderate 50% blockage.

They compared the effect of an exercise-induced heart rate at 140 beats per minute, which can be achieved by a brisk walk for some obese people, and resting heart rates of 67 and 100 bpm.

Healthy patients and those with only slightly blocked arteries appeared to have exercise be beneficial for maintaining healthy blood flow.

However, the results for those with moderate to severe blockage were concerning. –NY Post

According to author Somnathj Roy, “Intense exercise shows adverse effects on patients with moderate or higher stenosis levels,” adding “It substantially increases the shear stress at the stenosis zone, which may cause the stenosis to rupture. This ruptured plaque may then flow to the brain and its blood supply, causing ischemic stroke.”

Stroke, which is 80% preventable, is the #5 cause of death in the United States, according to the American Stroke Association.

“While stressful exercises may be beneficial for improving the cardiac performance of healthy individuals, the same may bring in extremely adverse consequences at elevated heart rates on account of extensive physical activities for patients having extensive arterial blockages, if not performed in supervision of specialized experts,” according to the report.

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Public Substack,

Congress must defund and dismantle the corrupt Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and fire its director, Jen Easterly

One of the big questions that those of us involved in exposing the secret U.S. government censorship effort have been asking ourselves over the last few months is: did the people involved know that they were breaking the law?

That question appears to have been answered with a resounding yes by the House Judiciary Committee. Yesterday it released its report, “The Weaponization of CISA: How a ‘Cybersecurity’ Agency Colluded with Big Tech and ‘Disinformation’ Partners to Censor Americans,” on government censorship.

“It’s only a matter of time,” wrote a former assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an email to a colleague, “before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.”

The “we” in that sentence refers to the network of government agencies and nongovernmental organizations that we and others have dubbed the Censorship Industrial Complex.

That Complex includes the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

Its leader, Kate Starbird, responded to the former CIA official, Susan Spaulding, by saying, “Yes. I agree. We have a couple of pretty obvious vulnerabilities.”

But one day later, Starbird dismissed the notion that she and her colleagues were doing anything wrong.

The real problem was, she explained, that “current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms” and that CISA may face “bad faith criticism” for its censorship.

What is “malinformation”?

It’s accurate information that might lead people to come to the wrong conclusions — or do things that Starbird, Spaulding, and their allies didn’t want them to do, like not getting vaccinated against Covid-19.

In truth, America’s taxpayer-funded censors view themselves not only as the good guys but as superheroes.

One of the leaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex, Jen Easterly, the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security, has as her Twitter photo a cartoon image of herself as a superhero complete with a cape.

The harsh reality is that Easterly, Starbird, and Spaulding have more in common with China’s censors than they do with America’s founders.

…

Those tactics appear to have been lifted whole cloth from George Orwell’s censors in “1984.” Totalitarianism begins, after all, with the corruption of language.

…

[Congress] should demand that Easterly be fired and CISA defunded and dismantled. If CISA is engaged in any worthwhile non-censorship activities, they should be moved to an agency staffed by people who don’t think it’s their business to regulate our “cognitive infrastructure” and imagine themselves to be superheroes.

Subscribers can read Michael’s full note here…

A record number of Americans are expected to hit the roadways this July 4th weekend. Despite elevated inflation straining households, there’s still a lot of pent-up travel demand after the pandemic years. Even with surging travel demand, fuel consumption is unlikely to exceed pre-Covid levels due to more efficient vehicles and the proliferation of EVs. 

“We’ve never projected travel numbers this high for Independence Day weekend,” Paula Twidale, Senior Vice President of AAA Travel, wrote in a new report released Monday. 

Twidale said, “What this tells us is that despite inventory being limited and some prices 50% higher, consumers are not cutting back on travel this summer. Many of them heeded our advice and booked early, another sign of strong travel demand.”

AAA projects more than 43 million motorists will drive at least 50 miles from their homes between June 30 and Tuesday, July 4. That’s a 2.4% increase versus 2022 and 4% compared to 2019. If travel by buses, trains, cruise ships, and planes is added, then a record 50.7 million Americans are expected to travel. 

Bloomberg pointed out that while record travel is expected for the holiday weekend, “widespread adoption of more efficient vehicles means fuel demand nonetheless remains muted — and might never get back to pre-pandemic rates.” Data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows the average car is more fuel efficient, getting about 33.3 miles per gallon. Also, the increasing number of EVs decreases fuel product demand at retail pumps. 

Americans are still traveling and spending money despite negative real wage growth for the past two years, along with soaring credit card balances and the highest interest rates in a generation. 

The next test for the consumer will be if they still can splurge on travel on late summer Labor Day weekend. 

Authored by Freda Wu and Sophia Lam via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Two people, who were detained by Shanghai State Security Police in October 2021 for developing software that circumvents the Great Firewall, received six- and five-year prison sentences on June 12, 2023.

He Binggang and his fiancée Zhang Yibo, along with several others, were arrested on Oct. 9, 2021, for developing and maintaining software that helps people living in China access overseas internet platforms, according to the Falun Dafa Infocenter.

The Chinese regime set up Great Firewall (GFW), or Golden Shield Project, in 1998, which is managed by the regime’s Ministry of Public Security to monitor and censor what can and cannot be seen in China through an online network.

He and Zhang are Falun Gong adherents, a spiritual practice that has been persecuted inside China since 1999 and has been the subject of intense political propaganda.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual improvement practice based on principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, with five slow-moving, gentle exercises that have significant physical benefits. The practice has been very popular in China, with an estimated 70 million to 100 million practitioners in the country before the Chinese communist regime began to persecute the belief and its followers in July 1999.

He and Zhang had developed software called oGate that allows Chinese people to freely access websites and information available outside of China but which are blocked by the GFW and otherwise unavailable inside China.

Persecuted for Belief: Reports

He and Zhang have been subjected to long-term persecution by the Chinese regime for their belief in Falun Gong.

According to Minghui.org, the police denied He’s lawyer from visiting him at Shanghai’s Changning District Detention Center. On March 10, 2022, his lawyer was allowed to talk to him on the phone at the detention center, but without seeing him in person.

He’s physical condition is very poor because of repeated torture by the Chinese regime.

“His neck issue and partial paralysis, which resulted from torture during [the] previous detention, worsened. He has now completely lost the ability to walk and has become bedridden. He has trouble falling asleep at night and suffers from constant dizziness, headache, and incontinence,” Minghui reported in June 2023.

He, 46, has been imprisoned two times previously.

He is a gifted software engineer, according to Minghui.org, a platform that tracks the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.

When he was 15 years old he created “Computerized Audible Aids for the Blind.” The invention won the Silver Award of the Sixth National Invention Award and the “Sixth Shanghai Yilida Youth Invention Award.”

He obtained a certificate in computer application software engineering as a senior programmer when he was only 16.

In 1994, He was admitted into Fudan University, and four years later he entered the graduate program.

In 2000, he was detained by police and later given a six-year sentence at Shanghai Tilanqiao Prison.

Fudan University expelled him.

In 2007, He was released and he began his own technological company. But in 2010, he was detained again for his spiritual practice.

According to a June report on Minghui.org, He was tortured when he was imprisoned for the second time, and the beatings caused him to become paralyzed due to severe spinal injuries. He was sentenced to five years in prison in April 2011 despite having been paralyzed.

Zhang was a business manager for a foreign company. The Xuhui Court sentenced her to one and a half years in prison in 2009 for her spiritual practice, according to Minghui.org.

Read more here…

Figures published today reveal beekeepers in the U.S. lost an estimated 48% of their honey bee colonies in 2022-23.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, according to an annual survey that tracks the state of managed hives, this is the second highest death rate on record after 2020-21’s 51%.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Honey bees are crucial to our food supply, pollinating over 100 different crop types.

As reported by Bee Informed, a national collaboration of leading research labs and universities in agricultural science, the most prominent cause of colony death reported by commercial beekeepers over the year was “varroa destructor” – a parasitic mite that attacks and feeds on honey bees.

In the summer, ‘Queen issues’ were the second most common reason cited, followed by ‘adverse weather’.

According to the publication, “although the total number of honey bee colonies in the country has remained relatively stable over the last 20 years (~2.6 million colonies according to the USDA NASS Honey Reports), loss rates remain high”.

This puts beekeepers under “substantial pressure” to create new colonies each year.

Authored by Max Blumenthal & Wyatt Reed Via The GrayZone,

For just over 12 hours, everyone from former U.S. ambassador to Russia and noted Hitler apologist Michael McFaul to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to neocon pundit Anne Applebaum exploded with seemingly libidinal excitement about a supposed “civil war” that was certain to feature “Russians…killing Russians,” along with “lots of casualties” and Putin “probably hiding somewhere.”

It was as though the Soviet Union was collapsing all over again, and Prigozhin, a character named on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list whom the U.S. government has sanctioned for leading what it described as a “transnational criminal organization,” was suddenly a white knight storming into Moscow to liberate Russia from “the Putin regime” on the back of a tank. Move over, Juan Guaido.

Expecting a bloodbath and seismic political upheaval, corporate networks like CNN had budgeted wall-to-wall coverage of the coup that wasn’t, filling cable news green rooms with rent-a-generals, K Street think tankers, and war-hungry former diplomatic corps hacks.

On Saturday afternoon, however, news broke across the U.S. that Prigozhin had struck a deal with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to end his protest and go into exile. Thus ended a largely bloodless affair that ultimately saw fewer documented deaths than the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot.

Though the supposed revolt in Russia burned out faster than a Leopard tank on the way to Zaporizhzhia, we now know that a number of serious casualties were incurred inside the D.C. Beltway. The Grayzone obtained an exclusive look at the massacre some of America’s top Russia experts carried out against their own credibility.

McFaul McFails, Again

Ever since he was unceremoniously ejected from Moscow for apparently attempting to organize a color revolution in 2012, Ambassador Michael McFaul has waged a personal jihad against the country’s government. His hatred of the Russian leadership grew so impassioned that he once declared that Putin was morally inferior to Adolf Hitler, embracing a fringe view associated with Holocaust deniers that asserts the Nazi dictator “didn’t kill German-speaking people.”

When the events of Friday kicked off, McFaul could hardly contain himself. The disgraced diplomat immediately took to Twitter to insist without a shred of evidence to claim that Putin “has ordered his army and others to destroy Wagner & Prigozhin.”

“So there’s going to be a big fight,” he promised.

As for the Russian President, McFaul confidently declared: “I am sure that he is no longer in Moscow.” Just after noon on Saturday, he seemed to believe the Russian president’s demise was imminent. “Rats are jumping” from Putin’s ship, he effused, referring to oligarch Arkady Rotenberg taking a flight to Azerbaijan. “This is now a civil war,” the self-styled expert confidently declared.

The fight is now on. This is now a civil war. https://t.co/FfQ0nakI1Z

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) June 24, 2023

But around 1:30 PM on Saturday the unwelcome news had made its way to Washington: Putin and Prigozhin had reached an agreement. There was to be no civil war in Russia, after all.

McFaul was suddenly forced to reckon with the reality that his predictions of a coup were premature, and that virtually everything he had said hours before was completely wrong. “Can anyone remember a mutiny or coup attempt that lasted 24 hours and no one really fought or was killed?,” pondered the retired diplomat, seemingly coming to grips with the obvious. 

Then, like an alcoholic in denial after yet another blackout, McFaul whimpered, “I was wrong about this. Eager to learn why.”

Anne Applebaum’s ‘Civil War’ 

This May, anti-Russian pseudo-scholar and former Iraq war cheerleader Anne Applebaum predicted a decisive Ukrainian counter-offensive that would storm through Russian defenses and not only “liberate” Crimea, but encourage regime change from Moscow to Venezuela. 

In an article co-authored by former Israeli prison guard and The Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, and illustrated by the Davos frontman, Bono, (with apparent help from an Etch-a-Sketch), Applebaum openly fantasized about a madman taking control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

“Even the worst successor imaginable,” she wrote, “even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin, because he will be weaker than Putin. He will quickly become the focus of an intense power struggle.”

By Friday, Applebaum seemed to believe her fever dreams were coming true. And it was then that she breathlessly announced, “Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war. ” 

“…what can only be described as a civil war,” according to Anne Applebaum, who also declared as a member of WaPo’s editorial board that Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD was “irrefutable” https://t.co/Vk2lr96MKw

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 24, 2023

“If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be,” she lectured readers, just hours before the bloodless “coup” came to a conclusion. 

Applebaum’s husband is the former foreign minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, who infamously tweeted his gratitude to the U.S. government for destroying the Nord Stream pipeline. While Sikorski deleted his tweet, Applebaum’s thoroughly discredited “civil war” article remains on the website of the Atlantic.

On Sunday, Applebaum and McFaul were rewarded for their badly botched analysis with an appearance on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki, which is hosted by the Biden White House’s former press secretary.

Zelensky: Putin Is ‘Very Afraid’

“The man from the Kremlin is obviously very afraid and probably hiding somewhere, not showing himself,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proclaimed on Saturday. According to fact checkers, Zelensky did not issue this bold statement from inside a bunker or in front of a green screen. 

U.S. Intelligence Claims ‘Surprise’

On Sunday, CNN reported that U.S. intelligence analysts were taken by surprise by “the swiftness of the deal that was struck on Saturday.”

What’s more, they believed that Prigozhin’s march toward Moscow “would encounter much more resistance” than it did.

“I do know that we assessed it was going to be a great deal more violent and bloody,” an unnamed U.S. official reportedly told the outlet.

But D.C.’s disappointment with the lack of carnage on Moscow streets did not end there.

Kurt Volker Declares ‘The End’ for Putin

Kurt Volker is a former U.S. special representative for Ukraine negotiations who also operated as a de facto Raytheon lobbyist while serving as the executive director of the John McCain Institute. Volker also functioned as a liaison for U.S. and Ukrainian business interests while presiding over the founding of American University Kyiv.

During a Saturday CNN appearance, Volker declared that the brief moment of disorder in Russia marked “the end for Putin” and “the beginning of the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine.” 

Christo Grozev: Bellingcat’s Neocon-Stradumus

Christo Grozev is the Russia director of the U.S. and U.K. government-funded website Bellingcat. This April, Grozev celebrated a terrorist attack that saw a Russian war blogger assassinated and a cafe full of civilians blown up in St. Petersburg, Russia. 

With chaos seemingly intensifying inside the Russian Federation again, Grozev suddenly transformed from a glorified OSINT blogger into a geopolitical soothsayer with a unique ability to divine the fate of the Kremlin. 

“Prigozhin says he’s got 25k strong army and he’s going to take power and deal with the ‘traitors’ at the top before returning to the front line,” the Bellingcat commentator claimed on Twitter. “Am old enough to remember how Russia ‘pundits’ said I was talking nonsense predicting a Prigozhin coup attempt this year.”

Having not been born literally yesterday, we at The Grayzone are thankfully old enough to remember when Prigozhin’s “coup attempt” failed to materialize and ended quickly with negotiations.

Our memory is so long, in fact, that we recall when the war prophet Grozev stated that Russia had expended 70 percent of its precision missile stocks back in April 2022. Since then, Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian targets have only increased.

Ian Bremmer: Peter Hotez of International Relations

As president of the Eurasia Group risk analysis firm, political scientist Ian Bremmer has leveraged his supposed expertise into a lucrative business.

Bremmer recently weighed in in defense of the absurdly double-talking pediatrician and pundit Peter Hotez, defending his decision not to debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Covid-related issues on the grounds that Hotez was a credentialed expert, and RFK Jr. was not.

wagner territorial gains in russia dramatically faster than in ukraine.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) June 24, 2023

“It would be like me debating elon [Musk] on electric vehicles. Or him debating me on international relations,” Bremmer argued, asserting his own superior credentials. “There’s no value added.”

During the events of Friday, Bremmer joined the rest of the Beltway expert class in predicting imminent doom for Putin. “wagner territorial gains in russia dramatically faster than in ukraine,” Bremmer wrote in a viral post seen by more than 1 million Twitter users.

Moments later, he joked that “ukraine has run out of popcorn,” implying that Kiev was eagerly preparing for Russia’s collapse. 

Following the announcement of Wagner’s stand-down on Saturday, an apparently disappointed Bremmer insisted “there’s no environment where [Putin and Prigozhin] hug it out.”

Top Biden Officials’ Travel Plans Interrupted

Among the most overlooked victims of the brief march on Moscow were high-ranking U.S. officials’ weekend plans.

On Saturday, a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced that a planned visit to Jordan and Israel by Gen. Mark Milley, the top military officer in the U.S., had been canceled “due to the situation in Russia.”

Biden administration National Security Council director and possible human scarecrow Jake Sullivan was forced to cancel a trip as well. Sullivan had reportedly been slated to attend a conference on Ukraine in Denmark until Prigozhin decided to make a trip of his own toward Rostov-on-Don.

Stephen King: Lost in Fantasy

Horror author-turned-liberal Russiagate conspiracist Stephen King, who once praised Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and Holocaust perpetrator Stepan Bandera in a phone call with a prankster he believed to be Volodymyr Zelensky, was clearly titillated by Friday’s events.

Putin sowed the wind.
Now he must reap the whirlwind.
Slava Ukraini!

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 24, 2023

When Prigozhin’s forces briefly took over the city of Rostov-on-Don, King once again proved unable to contain his overactive imagination. “Putin sowed the wind. Now he must reap the whirlwind. Slava Ukraini!” he exclaimed.  

Noted Online Stalker Idrees Ahmad Predicts ‘The Death of Aaron Mate’s Career’

Idress Ahmad once existed on the margins of the U.K.’s antiwar movement, publishing a book attacking the Iraq war-era neocon cabal, suggesting Senators Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold voted for Iran sanctions because they are Jewish, and openly questioning the West’s narrative of a genocide in Darfur.

After running into financial trouble and escaping deportation to his native Pakistan “against the odds” thanks to a Home Office decision that remains unexplained, Ahmad transformed into the very thing he once condemned. 

Having re-emerged as a rabid supporter of the West’s dirty war on Syria, Ahmad busied himself by stalking The Grayzone, even phoning its editor, Max Blumenthal, to threaten him against publishing a factual investigation of the Syrian White Helmets in 2016. 

While Ahmad’s recent work at the spook-infested Newlines think tank has failed to generate much interest, even among his fellow regime change cheerleaders, we noticed his prophecy on Saturday that Prigozhin’s “coup” would lead to the collapse of The Grayzone, the international committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, and “the death of Aaron Mate’s career.”

At the time of publication, we are still triggering Ahmad’s rage-a-holic personality while his own media career has gone about as far as Prigozhin’s march toward Moscow.

Back in late January, when prevailing consensus was that the Fed’s aggressive rate hikes would crush US residential housing, we showed readers a little known market indicator which signaled that the housing market was in far better shape than conventional wisdom suggested, and asked whether the housing market has bottomed.

Has The Housing Market Bottomed? The Surprising Result From A Little-Known Market Indicator https://t.co/0Om3HalcSI

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 30, 2023

Since then, despite mortgage rates rising to 7%, back to the highest level of the 21st century, housing stocks have continued to push higher, and the homebuilder ETF (XTB) is up 20%, and just shy of its all time high. In other words, at least as far as the market is concerned, the answer whether housing has bottomed has been a resounding yes.

But how is that possible? Isn’t the US consumer crushed? Aren’t credit standards so tight that virtually nobody can get a mortgage? Haven’t 7% mortgages made housing the most unaffordable in history?

While the answer to all those questions is a resounding yes, there is something else that matters much more, and is a far bigger driver of housing supply/demand equilibrium levels, i.e., prices.

We are talking, of course, about housing inventory… or the lack thereof.

Consider: according to the latest report RedFin, in May there were fewer homes for sale than any other month on record! Specifically, the number of homes for sale in the U.S. fell 7.1% year over year to 1.4 million on a seasonally adjusted basis in May. That’s the lowest level in Redfin’s records, which date back to 2012, and the first annual decline since April 2022.

By comparison, there were 2.2 million homes for sale in May 2019, before the pandemic rocked the U.S. housing market, meaning housing supply was 38.6% below pre-pandemic levels this May.

America’s housing stock is dwindling because there are very few people selling homes. A key reason cited for the lack of supply is that nobody who has a mortgage in the 3-4% ballpark, wants to cash out and take out a new mortgage that is up to 4% higher, wiping out any capital gains from the sale transaction. Some more math:

Nearly every homeowner with a mortgage has an interest rate below 6%, meaning many are opting to stay put because selling and buying a new home would mean taking on a higher monthly mortgage payment. The average 30-year-fixed mortgage rate in May was 6.43%, up from 5.23% a year earlier and a record low of 2.65% in 2021.

Whatever the reason for the lack of sales, new listings of homes for sale declined 25.2% year over year in May to the third lowest level on record on a seasonally adjusted basis, as homeowners were handcuffed by high mortgage rates.

As the pool of homes for sale shrinks, homebuyers in many markets are grappling with competition, which is preventing home prices from plunging despite a freeze in buyer demand brought on by elevated mortgage rates. Effectively, there is a standoff where sellers don’t fell compelled to sell, and buyers can’t afford to pay prices demanded by sellers, which has resulted in a deep freeze of the housing market where bids and asks for the same house are sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars apart.

Meanwhile, the median U.S. home sale price was $419,103 in May. That’s down just 3.1% from a year earlier, when prices hit a record high of $432,311. While home prices fell in May, they posted a smaller decline than they did in April, when prices dropped 4.2% from a year earlier—the largest decrease on record with the exception of January 2012.

Another remarkable consequence of the plunge in inventory is that the typical home that sells is no longer selling at a discount. According to RedFin, the average sale-to-list-price ratio, which measures how close homes are selling to their final asking prices, was 100% in May, meaning the typical home that sold was purchased at its list price. That’s down from 103.1% a year earlier, but is the highest level of any May on record prior to the pandemic and follows nine straight months of sub-100% sale-to-list-price ratio

Still, as Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather says, “it’s too early to say that price declines have bottomed out. Prices may have room to fall because mortgage rates could still rise. The Federal Reserve just signaled that it is likely to continue raising interest rates this year. That could further hamper homebuyer demand and cause home prices to fall in the near term, though the drops would be minimal. We’re unlikely to see double-digit price declines like we did during the 2008 housing crisis.”

There is another reason why prices may drop: there has been a flood of new home construction. As the next chart shows, the number of houses under construction at this moment are just shy of their all time high, and well above both starts and completions.

Which has a profound consequences for the US labor market: thanks to the frenzied in process construction of single family houses, employment in the construction sector is effectively the highest it has been since 2007, and rapidly approaching an all time high.

Which brings us to the punchline.

Remember when a few years ago the derogatory punchline lobbed at all those (reporters) who had been recently let go was to “learn to code.”  Fast forward a few years, and coder jobs have gone stone colder as a result of not only the surge in rates which has forced tech companies to become profitable (which most of them can’t so they have had to lay off hundreds of thousands of highly paid workers), but the coming AI/ChatGPT shock which will lead to even more layoffs. In any case, as the following chart from the Indeed hiring platform (which tracks job openings much more accurately than the politically-mandated mess that is JOLTs) shows, hiring for softwarre development jobs has plunged and is now near the March 2020 trough even as hiring of construction workers fires on all cylinders. Some more details:

Indeed hiring tabs open jobs by US sector relative to pre-covid Feb 2020 baseline: purple is Software Development (-16.1% from pre-pandemic) and blue is Construction (+49.2% from pre-pandemic). As Goldman notes, this is “clearly a reflection of the continued shortage of blue collar labor while the job cuts in big tech have had an impact on software employment.”

The bank concludes that this is “a good reminder that this labor market can not be painted with a broad brush while the secular forces of demographics, immigration and the wake of covid has left lasting labor shortages in pockets of the economy.”

Which is true. What is also true, is that the worker class that until not too long ago was certain it was immune from the vagaries of the economic cycle, and acted accordingly refusing to show up to the office and instead of actually working, spent the day at home in various yoga positions or drinking some supposedly healthy green crap while getting their 10th covid booster shot, the “coders” are suddenly in zero demand, while the “hot” job sector is now construction. To all those programmers, who are about to get steamrolled by the double whammy of being made obsolete by a chatGPT algos, we have three words of advice: “learn to build.”