Monday Night Links

• The truth is, the globalists at the WEF and their partners abroad FAILED in their efforts to institute medical tyranny, at least in the US and in certain parts of Europe. The agenda collapsed because the science was against them in every respect. They had nothing. With 99.7% of people safe from covid, it was impossible to engineer enough fear in enough of the population to get them to relinquish their freedoms. So, for those of us that have been tracking these events carefully, the alarm bells really started ringing when the WEF switched gears and suddenly shifted focus to a cyber-attack narrative. Was this Plan-B? [link]
• For some years now Russia has been trying to assert control over Belarus, while its president, Alexander Lukashenko, has been quite successful in maintaining Belarusian independence. He accomplished this by playing the EU and Russia off of each other, until events in 2020 derailed this strategy. What happened was a Western sponsored colour revolution broke out which threatened Lukashenko’s hold on power. Seeing a hostile West, Lukashenko naturally turned entirely to Russia. The colour revolution ultimately achieved nothing but to irrevocably push Lukashenko into Moscow’s sphere. What makes this all so incredibly ironic is that, if it had not been for this attempted colour revolution, it is very possible Belarus would have stayed largely neutral and would not be serving as a base of operations for Russia. Without Belarus, Russia’s offensive on Kiev would be impossible. Ultimately, the West’s hostile actions against Lukashenko made this offensive on Kiev possible. [Alexander's Cartographer]
• Your morning starts to go downhill quickly, however, when you realize that your SUV is almost out of gas. You pull the old clunker, with its antiquated combustion engine, into the nearest open station you can find – it looks pretty run-down – and roll up to the pump. A dull-eyed teenager in a facemask inserts a nozzle into your vehicle and waits for you to pre-pay. You wave your phone at the pump. Nothing happens. You try again. Your phone buzzes, and you look at it. There’s a message from the Fed: “You have already spent more than the $400 maximum weekly limit on fossil fuels specified in the FedWallet User Agreement. Your remaining account balance cannot be used to purchase non-renewable energy resources. Please make an alternative purchase. Have you considered a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle? Thank you for doing your part to build a more just and sustainable world!” You have in fact considered purchasing a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle. But they still aren’t very affordable for you, what with the supply chain shortages. Despite the instant credit the Fed would add to your balance when buying an electric car – plus the permanent ten percent general subsidy you automatically receive on every purchase as a BIPOC individual thanks to the Fed’s Reparations Alternatives for Comprehensive Equity (RACE) program – the down payment on a new car would still be more than you can afford, even with your new stimmie coins. [N.S. Lyons]
• The soviet system had two kinds of money. There was cash (nalichnye) that was the banknotes and coins, used for wages. Then there was non-cash (beznalichnye) which was a quasi-money that the government would distribute as subsidies to factories. There were extensive regulations on the use of each, and for a factory manager to convert non-cash into cash was prohibited. The purpose of a system like this, although the book does not explain this, would have been to reduce the inflationary impact that the subsidies would have on prices of goods in cash rubles. Using a combination of bribes and loopholes that are unclear to this day, Khodorkovsky apparently found a way to convert beznalichnye into nalichnye. They were nominally both rubles, but a beznalichnye could be had for something like a tenth of a nalichnye, and there were "arbitrages" because pricing of goods were not consistent in both.  Minus bribing and other expenses, you are talking about a corrupt Russian equivalent of the Buffett cocoa bean trade. [CBS]
  
• It turns out that the points in time where the dividend yield is high (when the prices of DMLP and/or oil are distressed) are very powerful in the compounding effect of distribution reinvestment. The reinvestment of the November 3, 2008 quarterly distribution grows your stake by 4.3%. The reinvestment on May 14, 2020 grows your stake by 4.7%. The result of the compounding is that one partnership unit purchased in January 2007 grows to 3.5 units with dividend reinvestment over the 15 year period. Those 3.5 shares are worth $83.34 now on a starting investment of $21.50. That is an IRR of 9.35%. This is particularly impressive since the valuation has fallen (the Dorchester distribution yield has increased) from 8.55% (annualized) at the start in 2007 to 10.8% (annualized) today. If the yield today matched what it was at the beginning of 2007, the price of a Dorchester unit would be $29.90 and the IRR would have been 11%. [CBS]
• He mentions that a fellow at his weight club died at age 45 from complications resulting from surgery on an ascending aortic aneurysm. (And a few years before that the same fellow had "completely ruptured" his patellar tendon!) Two books in a row with people who have far-out lifestyles that cause aneurysms. I do appreciate Coach Rip's high agency approach. He believes in personal responsibility and self improvement. But it seems like he is a "short life history" guy. Intellectual stimulation is more congruent with long life history than physical stimulation. [CBS]
• There are two big concerns with trying to pack on a lot of muscle through something like Rippetoe's program, joint/ligament health and also "powerlifter belly" / insulin resistance from the high calorie diets. Rippetoe (watch him make a protein shake) gets pretty heated when the subject of "six packs" (people with low bf%) comes up. Coach Rip's attitude about bf% and insulin resistance makes me wonder how careful he is about joints. [CBS]
• Conventional wisdom holds that global elites will pivot to climate change, now that Corona is ending. I’m starting to think that this might not happen and that we’ve misinterpreted the ideological significance of Corona. Perhaps Corona happened because climate change was not good enough – because, as a politically orienting ideological system, it had failed to mobilise institutions and populations in the right way, and had entered the first stages of decline. Perhaps, in the coming decades, there will be other hysterias, but no real ideological push on the climate front ever again. I’m not saying the climatologists, their institutions and associated grifts will disappear tomorrow. In any scenario, they’ll plug on for a long time. What I am imagining, though, is a future in which they’ll be steadily deprived of inertia, and ultimately fade into the background, like the war on terror. [eugyppius]
• The truth is, that the Ukrainians are the proxy of the Global American Empire, and that is the only reason that the media has called upon westerners to care about this conflict, rather than any others. Lockdowns weren’t a one-off; the vaccinators don’t just vaccinate. The enemies who have oppressed us these past two years are appendages of a much broader system. Climatism, anti-racism, transgender lunacy, Corona, and now the Ukraine: They are all of them expressions of the same malign force; they are all of them the same thing. [eugyppius]