Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin in a recent interview said he would not disclose the reason why he suffered cardiac arrest during a nationally broadcast game last month.

In his first interview since the incident, Hamlin discussed his collapse during a Jan. 2 “Monday Night Football” game against the Cincinnati Bengals. Hamlin spent more than a week in the hospital.

“You’re 24. Peak physical condition [that] could run circles around me right now. How did the doctors describe what happened to you?” ABC News’ “Good Morning America” host Michael Strahan, himself a former NFL player, asked Hamlin during an interview published this week.

Strahan: “How did doctors describe what happened to you?”

Damar Hamlin: “Umm… That’s something I want to stay away from.”

pic.twitter.com/aeDGffzYsm

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) February 14, 2023

Hamlin stated that he would not comment on what doctors told him. “That’s something I want to stay away from,” Hamlin said in response, which was not included in an ABC News article about the interview.

Strahan then asked: “I know from my experience at NFL, they do more tests than anything. And in the course of you having your physical, did anybody ever come back with any, say, you had a heart issue or anything that was abnormal?”

“Honestly, no. I’ve always been a healthy, young, fit, energetic human being, let alone athlete. So it was something that [we’re] still processing, and I’m still talking through my doctors to see what everything was,” Hamlin said in response.

Hamlin has continued to recover since he was released from the hospital last month. His interview with Strahan is the first one since he suffered the medical emergency.

Also in the interview, Hamlin said that he remembers preparing for the “Monday Night Football” game against the Bengals in Cincinnati and was feeling fine.

“I remember the things that we were focused on going into the game,” Hamlin told Strahan. “Just trying to get a win.”

Read more here…

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Europe’s natural gas futures point to structurally higher prices for the rest of the year, as Europe will soon have to start filling inventories for the 2023/2024 winter.

The TTF price, Europe’s benchmark, slipped on Monday to the lowest level since September 2021, and Europe looks confident that there will not be gas shortages this winter.

However, the race to ensure supply for next winter hasn’t even started in earnest yet. Prices are set to hold higher than before the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the summer as Europe will face stiffer competition from Asia for liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply. TTF futures for December are priced above €60 per megawatt-hour, notably higher than the €54 per megawatt-hour for March.

Last year, Asia – including China – saw lukewarm demand amid high spot prices and a slowdown in the Chinese economy. With China’s reopening, however, demand for gas and LNG is set to rebound, increasing the competition between Asia and Europe for spot supply, analysts say.

Moreover, the weather in Europe has been milder than usual for prolonged periods so far this winter, allowing for less gas consumption for heating and power generation. It is far from certain that Europe, and the northern hemisphere as a whole, will see mild temperatures next winter, too.

Governments and regulators in the EU say that while a major gas shortage crisis has been averted for this winter, next winter could be more difficult.

“Prices seem likely to remain structurally higher than they were before the Russian invasion,” Henning Gloystein, director for energy, climate and resources at Eurasia Group, said in a recent note carried by Bloomberg.

Europe continues to add new LNG import capacity, especially in Germany and the Netherlands, but if global supply is tighter, prices will spike again.

Europe’s gas prices were up by around 3% at $58 (54 euros) per megawatt-hour (MWh) around noon in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

Prices have held in the $53-64 (50-60 euros) per MWh for weeks amid higher-than-seasonal gas inventories, mild weather, and steady inflows of LNG.

Authored by Darren Taylor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

South Africa is set to host what analysts have described as “10 days of war games” with China and Russia from Feb. 17 to Feb. 26, which coincides with the anniversary of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The countries involved have described the event, to be held off South Africa’s east coast, as a “multilateral maritime exercise.”

“We are very much looking forward to seeing the Russian and Chinese navies in action; I am sure our navy will learn a lot,” a senior official in South Africa’s defense department told Voice of America.

“They have told us the warships are on their way, and they intend to demonstrate all kinds of sophisticated equipment and weapons, navigation systems, and much more.”

Guy Martin, a military and defense analyst at defenceWeb, a portal that analyzes military and security issues in Africa, told The Epoch Times that the Russian warship Admiral Gorshkov, currently off the Syrian coast, would soon make its way to the port of Durban.

“It’s armed with hypersonic Zircon missiles,” he said.

According to the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, Zircon missiles fly at nine times the speed of sound and have a range of at least 750 kilometers (466 miles), although the Russian military insists the range is more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles).

“The Zircon missile is strategically valuable due primarily to its speed,” the alliance states on its website.

“In April 2017, it was reported that the Zircon had reached a speed of Mach 8 during a test. If that information is accurate, the Zircon missile would be the fastest in the world, making it nearly impossible to defend against due to its speed alone.

“Another valuable aspect of the missile is its plasma cloud. During flight, the missile is completely covered by a plasma cloud that absorbs any rays of radio frequencies and makes the missile invisible to radars. This allows the missile to remain undetected on its way to the target.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin “has boasted about the Zircon missiles being able to pierce American defense systems,” Martin told the Epoch Times.

“He loves talking about them and really regards them as being the showpiece of his arsenal of cruise weapons,” he said.

“So, for him to be sending a ship armed with Zircons to South Africa is quite something.

“The message it’s sending is, ‘We regard our relationship with you as so close that we’re willing to show you our best weapons; we’re willing to show you the full capabilities of our naval force, and we know you won’t tell the West anything about what we show you, because you’re on our side against the imperialists.’”

‘Nostalgic Reasons’

“Economically speaking, it doesn’t make sense at all for the government to ally itself with Russia,” Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Program at the South African Institute of International Affairs, told The Epoch Times.

“Therefore, the only logical conclusion to draw is that the ANC is with Russia for nostalgic reasons, and also because it has bought into the Russian narrative that the war also represents a struggle against the imperialist West that bullies smaller countries.

“This, of course, ignores the fact that Russia is bullying Ukraine—or trying to, at least.”

Spector said the ANC is ignoring the “wishes and desires” of its own people by siding with Russia.

“The African middle-class and aspirant middle-class population is growing dramatically, and there are more people under the age of 30 in Africa than anywhere else,” he said.

“Ask those people if they want Russian or American goods and services. Pretty much everybody I’ve met in Africa who has any money is keen to get hold of some aspect of American output.”

Martin said South Africa’s participation in naval exercises, no matter the countries involved, is also “strange on a practical level,” given the “poor state” that its navy is in.

Much of South Africa’s naval fleet is in drydock because of a lack of funding and poor maintenance of vessels.

Read more here…

By Julieanne Geiger of Oilprice.com

The European Commission proposed tighter CO2 rules for heavy-duty vehicles this week, mandating that all new trucks reduce emissions by 90% by 2040 and all new city buses emit zero emissions starting in just 7 years, by 2030, according to a statement from the European Commission.

The EU’s objective is not only to help the EU get closer to its zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but to reduce its imported fossil fuels as well. There is already an agreement for new cars to be CO2-free by 2035, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

“The road transport sector represents one fifth of the EU’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is the main cause of air pollution in cities,” the Commission said, adding that the transport sector is the only sector in the EU where emissions have continued to rise in recent years. Heavy-duty trucks and buses are responsible for more than 25% of GHG emissions from road transport in the EU and 6% of total EU GHG emissions.

The Commission suggested that manufacturers must have to cut the typical CO2 emissions of the new trucks they sell by 90% from 2019 levels by 2040.

They would also have to reduce CO2 by 65% starting in 2035.

The EU opted for a 90% target instead of a 100% target for now because, according to EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans, zero-emissions technologies isn’t yet available for all trucks, and they don’t know when it will be.

The ultimate goal is still a 100% reduction in CO2 emissions for cars and trucks, but the EU did not comment on when the target might be shifted. 

Environmentalists who were hoping for more are unhappy that the bloc decided to forgo the last 10 percent. “Polluting trucks will continue to be sold for years longer than necessary, making the EU’s net zero goal impossible,” a freight manager at the Transport & Environment campaign group said, cited by Reuters, in response to the EU’s Tuesday announcement.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

A number of high-ranking military officials have joined some politicians in calling for Germany to bring back compulsory military service, and the AfD parliamentary group has now tabled a motion to discuss the possibility in Germany’s parliament next month.

The motion entitled “Reactivation of conscription” will be debated in the Bundestag on March 3, after which the proposal will be referred to the parliament’s defense committee for further deliberation.

Military personnel have called for a return to military service, which was phased out under former chancellor Angela Merkel in 2011, in order to replenish the German army’s depleting numbers. The Bundeswehr currently has 183,500 active personnel, ranking it the 28th largest army in the world.

Proposals to bring back military service were initiated by newly appointed Defense Minister Boris Pistorius who suggested such a move would restore a “connection to civic society at large” for a German youth that has lost its sense of civic duty.

In condemning recent attacks on emergency responders and police officers, Pistorius told Bavarian newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, “It appears that the people have lost the awareness that they themselves are part of the state and of society. Taking responsibility for a set period could open eyes and ears to that.”

Calls were swiftly rejected by other members of the German federal government. Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the same newspaper the debate was a “phantom dispute” and insisted the government’s efforts “have to be concentrated on strengthening the Bundeswehr as a highly professional army.”

Government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit dismissed the proposal as “nonsensical.”

However, military leaders appear to be on the side of some form of conscription.

“I believe that a nation that needs to become more resilient in times like these will have a higher level of awareness if it is mixed through with soldiers,” said Jan Christian Kaack, the chief of the German navy.

Following the announcement of the parliamentary debate, AfD MP Rüdiger Lucassen told German news outlet Junge Freiheit: “The arguments against conscription were always bogus arguments,” and insisted the Bundeswehr in its current capacity “is not capable of national defense because of its lack of personnel.”

The debate follows recent polling by YouGov that revealed just 5 percent of Germans would volunteer for military service if the country came under attack, while almost five times more (24 percent) would flee the country as soon as possible. A third of respondents (33 percent) said they would try to continue to live their normal life.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris.

Seymour Hersh’s bombshell report on how the United States government blew up the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea last September continues to generate rippling geopolitical waves all across the spectrum.

Except, of course, in the parallel bubble of U.S. mainstream media, which has totally ignored it, or in a few select cases, decided to shoot the messenger, dismissing Hersh as a “discredited” journalist, a “blogger”, and a “conspiracy theorist”.

I have offered an initial approach, focused on the plentiful merits of a seemingly thorough report, but also noting some serious inconsistencies.

Old school Moscow-based foreign correspondent John Helmer has gone even further; and what he uncovered may be as incandescent as Sy Hersh’s own narrative.

The heart of the matter in Hersh’s report concerns attribution of responsibility for a de facto industrial terror attack. Surprisingly, no CIA; that falls straight on the toxic planning trio of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland – neoliberal-cons part of the “Biden” combo. And the final green light comes from the Ultimate Decider: the senile, teleprompt-reading President himself. The Norwegians feature as minor helpers.

That poses the first serious problem: nowhere in his narrative Hersh refers to MI6, the Poles (government, Navy), the Danes, and even the German government.

There’s a mention that on January 2022, “after some wobbling”, Chancellor Scholz “was now firmly on the American team”. Well, by now the plan had been under discussion, according to Hersh’s source, for at least a few months. That also means that Scholz remained “on the American team” all the way to the terror attack, on September 2022.

As for the Brits, the Poles and all NATO games being played off Bornhom Island more than a year before the attack, that had been extensively reported by Russian media – from Kommersant to RIA Novosti.

The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”.

So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.

While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background.

In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia.

Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.

That elusive source

The narrative leaves no doubt that Hersh’s source – if not the journalist himself – supports what is considered a lawful U.S. policy: to fight Russia’s “threat to Western dominance [in Europe].”

So what seems a U.S. Navy covert op, according to the narrative, may have been misguided not because of serious geopolitical reasons; but because the attack planning intentionally evaded U.S. law “requiring Congress to be informed”. That’s an extremely parochial interpretation of international relations. Or, to be blunt: that’s an apology of Exceptionalism.

And that brings us to what may be the Rosebud in this Orson Welles-worthy saga. Hersh refers to a “secure room on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building …that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board”.

This was supposedly the place where the terror attack planning was being discussed.

So welcome to PIAB: the President Intelligence Advisory Board. All members are appointed by the current POTUS, in this case Joe Biden. If we examine the list of current members of PIAB, we should, in theory, find Hersh’s source (see, for instance, “President Biden Announces Appointments to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Science Board”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”; and “President Biden Announces Key Appointments to Boards and Commissions”.

Here are the members of PIAB appointed by Biden: Sandy Winnefeld; Gilman Louie; Janet Napolitano; Richard Verma; Evan Bayh; Anne Finucane; Mark Angelson; Margaret Hamburg; Kim Cobb; and Kneeland Youngblood.

Hersh’s source, according to his narrative, asserts, without a shadow of a doubt, that “Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine” and that “alarm was growing in Washington”. It’s beggars belief that this supposedly well informed lot didn’t know about the massing of NATO-led Ukrainian troops across the line of contact, getting ready to launch a blitzkrieg against Donbass.

What everyone already knew by then – as the record shows even on YouTube – is that the combo behind “Biden” were dead set on terminating the Nord Streams by whatever means necessary. After the start of the SMO, the only thing missing was to find a mechanism for plausible deniability.

For all its meticulous reporting, the inescapable feeling remains that what Hersh’s narrative indicts is the Biden combo terror gambit, and never the overall U.S. plan to provoke Russia into a proxy war with NATO using Ukraine as cannon fodder.

Moreover, Hersh’s source may be eminently flawed. He – or she – said, according to Hersh, that Russia “failed to respond” to the pipeline terror attack because “maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did”.

In itself, this may prove that the source was not even a member of PIAB, and did not receive the classified PIAB report assessing Putin’s crucial speech of September 30, which identifies the “responsible” party. If that’s the case, the source is just connected (italics mine) to some PIAB member; was not invited to the months-long situation-room planning; and certainly is not aware of the finer details of this administration’s war in Ukraine.

Considering Sy Hersh’s stellar track record in investigative journalism, it would be quite refreshing for him to elucidate these inconsistencies. That would get rid of the fog of rumors depicting the report as a mere limited hangout.

Considering there are several “silos” of intel within the U.S. oligarchy, with their corresponding apparatuses, and Hersh has cultivated his contacts among nearly all of them for decades, there’s no question the allegedly privileged information on the Nord Stream saga came from a very precise address – with a very precise agenda.

So we should see who the story really indicts: certainly the Straussian neo-con/neoliberal-con combo behind “Biden”, and the wobbly President himself. As I pointed out in my initial analysis, the CIA gets away with flying colors.

And we should not forget that the Big Narrative is changing fast: the RAND report, the looming NATO humiliation in Ukraine, Balloon Hysteria, UFO psy op. The real “threat” is – who else – China. What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris. Knowing that those who really run the show never show their hand.

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government.”

 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower

The government wants us to bow down to its dictates.

It wants us to buy into the fantasy that we are living the dream, when in fact, we are trapped in an endless nightmare of servitude and oppression.

Indeed, with every passing day, life in the American Police State increasingly resembles life in the dystopian television series The Prisoner.

First broadcast 55 years ago in the U.S., The Prisoner—described as “James Bond meets George Orwell filtered through Franz Kafka”—confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the loss of freedom, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of human beings to meekly accept their lot in life as prisoners in a prison of their own making.

Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner centers around a British secret agent who abruptly resigns only to find himself imprisoned in a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise with parks and green fields, recreational activities and even a butler.

While luxurious, the Village’s inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, all of their movements tracked by militarized drones, and stripped of their individuality so that they are identified only by numbers.

“I am not a number. I am a free man,” is the mantra chanted in each episode of The Prisoner, which was largely written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, who also played the title role of Number Six, the imprisoned government agent.

Throughout the series, Number Six is subjected to interrogation tactics, torture, hallucinogenic drugs, identity theft, mind control, dream manipulation, and various forms of social indoctrination and physical coercion in order to “persuade” him to comply, give up, give in and subjugate himself to the will of the powers-that-be.

Number Six refuses to comply.

In every episode, Number Six resists the Village’s indoctrination methods, struggles to maintain his own identity, and attempts to escape his captors. “I will not make any deals with you,” he pointedly remarks to Number Two, the Village administrator a.k.a. prison warden. “I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.”

Yet no matter how far Number Six manages to get in his efforts to escape, it’s never far enough.

Watched by surveillance cameras and other devices, Number Six’s attempts to escape are continuously thwarted by ominous white balloon-like spheres known as “rovers.”

Still, he refuses to give up.

“Unlike me,” he says to his fellow prisoners, “many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.”

Number Six’s escapes become a surreal exercise in futility, each episode an unfunny, unsettling Groundhog’s Day that builds to the same frustrating denouement: there is no escape.

As journalist Scott Thill concludes for Wired, “Rebellion always comes at a price. During the acclaimed run of The Prisoner, Number Six is tortured, battered and even body-snatched: In the episode ‘Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling,’ his mind is transplanted to another man’s body. Number Six repeatedly escapes The Village only to be returned to it in the end, trapped like an animal, overcome by a restless energy he cannot expend, and betrayed by nearly everyone around him.”

The series is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

As Thill noted, “The Prisoner was an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.”

The Prisoner’s Village is also an apt allegory for the American Police State, which is rapidly transitioning into a full-fledged Surveillance State: it gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

The American Surveillance State, much like The Prisoner’s Village, is a metaphorical panopticon, a circular prison in which the inmates are monitored by a single watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.

Eighteenth century social theorist Jeremy Bentham envisioned the panopticon prison to be a cheaper and more effective means of “obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

Bentham’s panopticon, in which the prisoners are used as a source of cheap, menial labor, has become a model for the modern surveillance state in which the populace is constantly being watched, controlled and managed by the powers-that-be while funding its existence.

Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide: this is the mantra of the architects of the Surveillance State and their corporate collaborators.

Government eyes are watching you.

They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to amass a profile of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, we’re approaching a time in which we will be forced to choose between bowing down in obedience to the dictates of the government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity and independence.

When people talk about privacy, they mistakenly assume it protects only that which is hidden behind a wall or under one’s clothing. The courts have fostered this misunderstanding with their constantly shifting delineation of what constitutes an “expectation of privacy.” And technology has furthered muddied the waters.

However, privacy is so much more than what you do or say behind locked doors. It is a way of living one’s life firm in the belief that you are the master of your life, and barring any immediate danger to another person (which is far different from the carefully crafted threats to national security the government uses to justify its actions), it’s no one’s business what you read, what you say, where you go, whom you spend your time with, and how you spend your money.

Unfortunately, George Orwell’s 1984—where “you had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized”—has now become our reality.

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed, corralled and controlled by technologies that answer to government and corporate rulers.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

Stingray devices mounted on police cars to warrantlessly track cell phones, Doppler radar devices that can detect human breathing and movement within in a home, license plate readers that can record up to 1800 license plates per minute, sidewalk and “public space” cameras coupled with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology that lay the groundwork for police “pre-crime” programs, police body cameras that turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras, the internet of things: all of these technologies (and more) add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence—especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

As French philosopher Michel Foucault concluded in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, “Visibility is a trap.”

This is the electronic concentration camp—the panopticon prison—the Village—in which we are now caged.

It is a prison from which there will be no escape. Certainly not if the government and its corporate allies have anything to say about it.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what [government officials] do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. This dynamic – the hallmark of a healthy and free society – has been radically reversed. Now, they know everything about what we do, and are constantly building systems to know more. Meanwhile, we know less and less about what they do, as they build walls of secrecy behind which they function. That’s the imbalance that needs to come to an end. No democracy can be healthy and functional if the most consequential acts of those who wield political power are completely unknown to those to whom they are supposed to be accountable.”

None of this will change, no matter which party controls Congress or the White House, because despite all of the work being done to help us buy into the fantasy that things will change if we just elect the right candidate, we’ll still be prisoners of the Village.

So how do you escape? For starters, resist the urge to conform to a group mind and the tyranny of mob-think as controlled by the Deep State.

Think for yourself. Be an individual.

As McGoohan commented in 1968, “At this moment individuals are being drained of their personalities and being brainwashed into slaves… As long as people feel something, that’s the great thing. It’s when they are walking around not thinking and not feeling, that’s tough. When you get a mob like that, you can turn them into the sort of gang that Hitler had.”

You want to be free? Remove the blindfold that blinds you to the Deep State’s con game, stop doping yourself with government propaganda, and break free of the political chokehold that has got you marching in lockstep with tyrants and dictators.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until you come to terms with the fact that the government is the problem (no matter which party dominates), you’ll never stop being prisoners.

One week ago we said that every market period has a distinct bogeyman for when a trade doesn’t go your way: “8 years ago, every most hated rally was “explained” with HFTs; 4 years ago it was gamma. Now it’s 0DTE.”

8 years every most hated rally was “explained” with HFTs; 4 years ago it was gamma. Now it’s 0DTE

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 5, 2023

Fast forward to today when JPMorgan’s former permabull-turned-ultrabear Marko Kolanovic, who earlier this week one again reiterated his bearish case alongside Michael Wilson only to see stocks rip higher, did just that when he not only blamed Zero-Days to Expiration options (which we profiled first in “What’s Behind The Explosion In 0DTE Option Trading“, and followed up here “Why 0DTE Is So Important, And Why The VIX Is Now Meaningless“) for why stocks refuse to go down and finally prove him right (as a reminder Marko erroneously spent most of 2022 urging clients to buy the dip, then turned bearish just before the January meltup), but warned that 0DTE itself is emerging as one of the potential ticking time bombs embedded within the market’s microstructure.

Marko starts off by lamenting the continued melt up, which he did not anticipate (as otherwise he clearly would have told his clients to go along for the ride), and instead he explains (after the fact of course( why it occurred, and why those investors who chase the risk wave higher are begging for punishment from none other than the Fed itself, because who in their right minds would fight the Fed… although actually the answer is pretty much everyone as we explained a few weeks ago.

Since the last Fed meeting, the 2-year bond yield is up ~60bp. After all, it is the bond market moving toward the Fed, rather than the Fed to the bond market. However, equity markets are rallying, and the prevailing sentiment is of exuberance and greed. For instance, AAII % bulls is the highest since 2021 and AAII % bears is the lowest since 2021, the CNN fear-greed index is at extreme greed, and financial conditions (e.g., as measured by BFCIUS) are the least restrictive in a year. This divergence between equity and bond markets is odd – as the main premise of the recent equity rally was not just the Fed cutting interest rates in the second half but also a soft landing. Leadership of equity markets has also been upside-down given the yields moving higher. In fact, it is the lower quality, long-duration segments such as unprofitable and speculative tech that has been at the forefront of the rally (while short-duration segments lagged). There is an old adage ”don’t fight the Fed,” but this behavior is not just fighting but also taunting the Fed with crypto, meme stocks, and unprofitable companies responding best to Fed communications. Retail activity (volumes) are near record high with over 20% of all market volume coming from retail orders.

Here, Marko is simply recapping what we said more than two weeks ago when we first pointed out that it was once again retail that is leading the charge higher, and as we followed up today in ‘Here They Come: Hedge Funds “Start To Rerisk”, Buy Tech For 11 Straight Days“, it was indeed retail – like in early 2021 – that woke the hedge fund fast money out of hibernation and back into buying, with just the Long Only crowd still waiting on the sidelines, but not for long.

Of course, Marko can’t concede that we may have seen a low in the market now that there is a panicked pursuit of risk higher, and instead he presents – as he has done for the past two months – several arguments why buying here is a bad idea even though stocks are now about 400 points higher than where he first said to sell and/or short. He starts off by pointing out the correlation between 2Y yields and stocks and asserts that “the move in 2y interest rates since the Fed meeting should result in a ~5- 10% sell-off in Nasdaq (Figures 1 and 2), which is actually up ~3% since, and for high-beta tech the divergence is much larger. However, this divergence cannot go much further, in our view, and may revert.“

The Croat then shifts to macro challenges facing risk – all of which are well known and have been largely pried in by now – although not according to the JPM strategist who claims that “over the last three months, complacency set in with investors when it comes to geopolitical risks. There is a perception that the energy crisis is over and that the war in Ukraine is not an issue any more – supporting the record rally in European stocks – and recent geopolitical tensions related to China do not resonate with short-term financial inflows into the asset class.” Of course, since Kolanovic remains bearish – for at least another 100 points in the S&P – he believes that “geopolitical risks may re-escalate in the near future… which would negatively impact European FX and equities.” Among the potential geopolitical powderkegs, is that Europe still remains beholden to Russia for its energy needs, to wit:

Recently, a number of media outlets and politicians have claimed that Europe won the energy war due to warm weather, increased LNG shipments, and reduced consumption. However, this might only amount to a short-term Band-Aid at an unsustainable annual cost of 5% of EU GDP along with shutdowns of industrial and residential consumption. Furthermore, the situation remains quite fragile, for instance, if Russia were to disrupt some of the Norway gas pipelines or LNG shipping, e.g., as a response to recently published allegations (e.g., see here), the energy crisis would rapidly escalate. Also it has been broadly reported that a new Russian offensive could start in the near future, and that would most likely reduce risk appetite globally and negatively impact European assets. The relationship of the West with China has also been deteriorating recently, and as China regains economic momentum, one should expect more rather than less geopolitical tensions.

While it remains to be seen if a new geopolitical crisis will dent risk assets – in a world where the elusive bear case increasingly needs a fresh global war – Kolanovic actually makes an interesting point next, arguing that it is the 0DTE phenomenon discussed above (and earlier) that could potentially destabilize stocks and lead to a painful flush lower.

Here, the Croat reminds readers of the infamous Volmageddon episode in Feb 2018, which was basically a historic VIX spike triggered by a collapse in inverse VIX products and fueled by further systematic selling.

For Kolanovic, it’s deja vu all over again, and the JPM strategist claims that we may get a similar market event, only instead of inverse VIX ETN, this time he blames 0DTE option activity as the source of vol suppression and selling which is destabilizing markets and could lead to a furious selloff. Here is his explanation:

The rise of inverse volatility products prior to Volmageddon started as a virtuous feedback loop of volatility selling. Selling the VIX directly suppressed the level of implied volatility (boosting performance of short volatility products), as well as indirect suppression of realized volatility (via gamma hedging of underlying options). The decline of volatility and intraday hedging also manifested as buying the dip behavior. As the strong performance of volatility selling became self-fulfilling, leverage and tail risk in these products increased. On February 5, 2018, leverage was such that an increase of the VIX resulted in daily rebalance (closing of short VIXpositions) that overwhelmed the market liquidity and led to an uncontrolled increase of volatility. This in turn triggered further selling from various other systematic investors such as volatility targeters, gamma hedgers, and CTAs.

Remember what we said above: 4 years ago traders blamed gamma when a trade didn’t go their way, and now they blame 0DTE? Well, here is Marko capturing perfectly what we said, by pointing out that “while history doesn’t repeat, it often rhymes, and current selling of 0DTE (zero day to expiry), daily and weekly options is having a similar impact on markets.” The impact  he is referring to is an analogue to the VIX suppression by inverse vol ETNs in 2018, not that it is 0DTE’s fault for keeping his bearish scenario from materializing. 

But we digress: going back to 0DTE, the JPM strategist notes that the volumes in these short-term options are “very large” which of course is correct as we showed earlier today.

Marko picks up on this, and in the chart below he shows the daily notional volumes in these short-term options is ~$1 trillion; the Croat claims that “these options are net sold by directional investors, and supply of gamma is likely causing a suppression of realized intraday volatility.” These are typically low delta options that rarely get in the money, and their impact is mostly through volatility suppression and an intraday buy-the-dip pattern that results from hedging. However, Kolanovic warns, “if there is a big move when these options get in the money, and sellers cannot support these positions, forced covering would result in very large directional flows.”

These flows could “particularly impact markets given the current low liquidity environment” (or, inversely, the lack of a 0DTE crash particularly impacts markets by pushing them higher every day in the current low liquidity environment).

Marko then takes his thought experiment in 0DTE precrime to the final level, and says that by estimating how much of these short-term options are net sold by directional investors (and hedged by dealers), if there is a large market move, he calculates that “covering of short-term option delta could result in intraday selling on a large down move (or buying on a large up move) on the order of ~$30bn.”

And since 0DTE is just the tip of the derivative iceberg, Kolanovic warns that “one should also take into account that these flows would trigger further one-way flows from monthly option hedging as well as volatility control strategies and CTAs (particularly in a case of a large down move).”

Couple of points here: of course the market is unstable: that’s hardly news; in fact the market has been fragile and illiquid since the start of QE1, and has only gotten worse the more central bank intervention it benefited from over the years. But that fragility was a double edged sword since any resulting selloff would prompt the Fed to intervene. In fact, some bulls should hope that Kolanovic is right because a market crash would only precipitate a faster end to tightening and QT and lead to a far more powerful and sustainable rally. Another point is that we have seen 0DTE aggressively expand its presence for the past 3 years, so far without any dramatic consequences; and while it is certain that one day we will have Volmageddon 2.0 (whether due to 0DTE or something else), it could be tomorrow or it could be in one year, and by then the S&P could be at 4,500… or 5,000… or 6,000. One thing is certain: now that he is in full-blown bear mode again, don’t expect Marko to tell you when stocks will rise, only that they will fall (eventually), and if one week, or one month, or one year from today stocks are (much) higher, the Croat will have a detailed and convincing explanation for why the rally simply refuses to end (as it has so far). If only he also had a just as convincing way to make his clients some money…

Authored by Chris Hedges via Scherpost.com,

Woke culture, devoid of class consciousness and a commitment to stand with the oppressed, is another tool in the arsenal of the imperial state…

The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.

The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.

Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.

Colonial regimes find compliant indigenous leaders — “Papa Doc” François Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran — willing to do their dirty work while they exploit and loot the countries they control. To thwart popular aspirations for justice, colonial police forces routinely carried out atrocities on behalf of the oppressors. The indigenous freedom fighters who fight in support of the poor and the marginalized are usually forced out of power or assassinated, as was the case with Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lakota chief Sitting Bull was gunned down by members of his own tribe, who served in the reservation’s police force at Standing Rock. If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed. This is why the FBI, along with Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton and was almost certainly involved in the murder of Malcolm X, who referred to impoverished urban neighborhoods as “internal colonies.” Militarized police forces in the U.S. function as armies of occupation. The police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are no different from those in reservation and colonial police forces.

We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.

“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report told me in 2018.

“These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”

Ford called those who promote identity politics “representationalists” who “want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want Black scientists. They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”

The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department for Health and Human Services. As of 2021, Black and Native American children lived in poverty at 28 and 25 percent respectively, followed by Hispanic children at 25 percent and white children at 10 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties.  African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.

Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control. 

Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about  incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them. 

A class I taught in a maximum security prison in New Jersey wrote “Caged,” a play about their lives. The play ran for nearly a month at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it was sold out nearly every night. It was subsequently published by Haymarket Books. The 28 students in the class insisted that the corrections officer in the story not be white. That was too easy, they said. That was a feint that allows people to simplify and mask the oppressive apparatus of banks, corporations, police, courts and the prison system, all of which make diversity hires. These systems of internal exploitation and oppression must be targeted and dismantled, no matter whom they employ. 

My book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” uses the experience of writing the play to tell the stories of my students and impart their profound understanding of the repressive forces and institutions arrayed against them, their families and their communities. You can see my two-part interview with Hugh Hamilton about “Our Class” here and here.

August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” foretold where diversity and identity politics devoid of class consciousness were headed. In the play, Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated real estate developer, is about to launch his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. His wife, Mame, is angling to become the governor’s press secretary. Wilks, navigating the white man’s universe of privilege, business deals, status seeking and the country club game of golf, must sanitize and deny his identity. Roosevelt Hicks, who had been Wilk’s college roommate at Cornell and is a vice president at Mellon Bank, is his business partner. Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks: 

You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got blindyitis. A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.

Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.

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