BRICS plan to be based on Keynes’ Bancorp idea

Appears more viable than expected

It appears as though the BRICS plan is more viable than expected, as it is based on Keynes’ Bancorp idea (with unknown variances).  (Source: Jim Rickards: informed speculation)
 

BRICS PREVIOUSLY APPEARED UNWORKABLE:

  • Yesterday I talked to Bryan about the upcoming BRICS meeting in Johannesburg and I said that China will never want to back the new BRICS currency with gold because they won’t want to limit their “money printing.”
 

KEEP NATIONAL CURRENCIES:

  • Today I listened to a Jim Richards interview suggesting that Russia has developed a very smart plan in which each country keeps their own currencies, but the countries will use a common currency to settle international transactions between each other.

KEYNES’ BANCORP:

  • This plan is based on the Bancorp plan that Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods (with some possible tweaks).  There is not necessarily expected to be a large immediate effect, but Rickards said he expects the dollar to gradually lose value to gold over time and the demand for US Treasuries to decrease.
  • Rather than backing the currency with gold or commodities, the BRICS settlement currency (or whatever it is called) will be pegged to a reference weight of gold (rather than price). This means that no country has to own any actual gold – it’s just a reference value that is simpler to calculate than it would be if they used various commodities, including oil. [footnote]Rickards mentioned that Keynes initially wanted to use commodities in the Bancor, but the problem is that they are not fungible –there are many grades of things like wheat and oil. I recall Rickard saying: When people go down the path of a commodity-based unit of account, they eventually standardize on gold. It has more of the other properties of money than other commodities .[/footnote]
 
The BRICS Meeting in South Africa is scheduled for Tuesday August 22.
  • Victoria Nuland is expected to pay South Africa a visit to dissuade them from doing this.

Can you Critique Dr. Fauci without Criticizing “Science”?

Conflict of Interest

The Public Health leadership may be well-meaning, but they sometimes conflate criticism of their leadership with criticism of “Science.”

  • Dr. Anthony Fauci said: Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science , and
  • Dr. Peter Hotez escalated this type of rhetoric, describing what he calls: anti-science aggression,

Thesis:

  • This post doesn’t criticize the science of vaccines, rather it argues that people have legitimate suspicions that American Public Health Leadership have made significant mistakes and covered them up.
  • Rather than these cover-ups serving to protect the institution of “Science,” public health leadership has protected themselves, while perpetuating the very distrust of Science and frontline medical personnel their invocation of “authority” was seeking to dispel.

The Twitter Files showed that Establishment prefers to suppress opposition via censorship. This has resulted in Liberals and “the educated” being the people slowest to learn of contrary information, as it takes time for the information to surface in establishment media, if it ever does at all.[footnote]Establishment media is very quick to cover anything related to Trump (whether justifiied or not), but there seems to be a concern that holding the establishment accountable is unimportant, or even that it might help Trump.  In the long term, the unaccountability of the establishment creates the tinder that demagogues burn.[/footnote] 
I compiled this list for those who are unaware of the legitimate critiques of the American public health leadership relating to Covid-19, with the hope that sunlight is the best disinfectant. [Read more…]

Early Ukraine – Russia Negotiations by Naftali Bennett, stopped by Boris Johnson (Sources)

1) “The World Putin Wants”

Foreign Affairs – American establishment foreign policy organ

According to multiple former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.

 

2) Ukraine and Russia explore neutrality plan in peace talks

Financial Times: British financial publication

Fifteen-point draft deal would involve Kyiv renouncing Nato ambitions in return for security guarantees

Ukraine and Russia have made significant progress on a tentative peace plan including a ceasefire and Russian withdrawal if Kyiv declares neutrality and accepts limits on its armed forces, according to five people briefed on the talks. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators discussed the proposed deal in full for the first time on Monday, said two of the people. The 15-point draft considered that day would involve Kyiv renouncing its ambitions to join Nato and promising not to host foreign military bases or weaponry in exchange for protection from allies such as the US, UK and Turkey, the people said.

 

3) Zelenskiy suggests Israel as good place to hold talks with Russia

Reuters:

March 21 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that Israel was undertaking many efforts to arrange top-level peace talks between his country and Russia and suggested they might take place in Jerusalem.

Zelenskiy, speaking in his daily video appeal to Ukrainians after addressing Israel’s parliament by video link, said Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had been trying to act as an intermediary between Kyiv and Moscow.

 

4) “Diplomacy Watch: Did Boris Johnson help stop a peace deal in Ukraine?”

Responsible Statecraft – Policy Publication of Quincy Institute non-
partisan think tank, advocating “realism” and restraint, with multiple links

The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter. The decision to scuttle the deal coincided with Johnson’s April visit to Kyiv, during which he reportedly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to break off talks with Russia for two key reasons: Putin cannot be negotiated with, and the West isn’t ready for the war to end.

 

5) Mediation by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet

Naftali Bennet – YouTube Channel (primary source)

Interview in Hebrew with Israeli Channel: long description of the mediation process

(make sure to turn on English closed captioning).

 

6)  The Grinding War in Ukraine Could Have Ended a Long Time Ago

Jakobin – Left Wing  (summary with sources)

This past weekend saw the publication of a bombshell interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who over the course of a nearly five-hour interview dropped an unusual amount of detail about his efforts to mediate peace talks between Russia and Ukraine early in the war last year. The headline-grabbing news is Bennett’s claim that negotiations that were yielding fruit and that could have ended the now nearly year-long war after a little more than a month were ultimately blocked by the NATO governments underwriting Ukraine’s war effort.

According to Bennett, as early as the second Saturday of the war, or a little less than a week and a half into the war, both Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin made major concessions: Putin, by giving up on the goals of the “demilitarization” of Ukraine and its “denazification” — meaning, as Bennett interpreted it, regime change — and Zelensky by giving up on pursuing NATO membership.

How to Download YouTube Videos using Python

Every once in a while I see a YouTube video that I fear is significant enough that it may be censored or deleted at a future date.

Such is the case with my recent post about Jeffrey Sach’s interview with Bloomberg :

Interview Bloomberg “Surveillance” : Jeffery Sachs:  10/03/202

Interview Starts @ 1:51:21  | Read original blog post.

 

INSTRUCTIONS:

1) IF NO TECHNICAL SKILLS:

  • If you don’t have the technical skills, YouTube’s Premium subscription gives you access to do this.

 

2) IF SOME PYTHON TECH SKILLS:

  • But if you have a little programming savvy, you can use a program that I’ve used to do my CiteIt transcripts.
  • In this example we are assuming you have Python and pip installed. (pip is included in Python 3.4+)

[Read more…]