Former Spy Details Israel’s Main Motive Behind Epstein’s Sexual Blackmail Operation — Whitney Webb

Next installment of the Epstein saga. The plot thickens.

Mint Press News
Former Spy Details Israel’s Main Motive Behind Epstein’s Sexual Blackmail Operation

Whitney Webb

What Xi Jinping thinks about development economics — Andrew Batson

Must-read.

Note: Xi Jinping was trained as a chemical engineer.

Andrew Batson's Blog
What Xi Jinping thinks about development economics

Andrew Batson

Boris Johnson Focuses on Swift Brexit, Boost to Public Spending

Sounds pretty good for the UK:

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to move quickly to take Britain out of the European Union, while promising to deliver billions of pounds in public spending to consolidate the Conservative Party’s once-in-a-generation gains among working-class voters still hurting from the financial crisis.

Trump promises to move quickly on talks for a new U.S.-U.K. trade deal https://t.co/hzTqFgqDSM

— Real Time Economics (@WSJecon) December 13, 2019

Links — 12 Dec 2019

One News Network
China set to agree growth target of around 6% for 2020: Nikkei

Bolivia’s Morales lands in Argentina, will be granted refugee status

HaAretz
Most neo-Nazi music festivals are closely guarded secrets — not this one in Ukraine
Michael Colborne

BNE IntelliNews
Russia emerges as a top three fintech market
Vladimir Kozlov

Checkpoint Asia — Anti Empire
Russia Needs to Stop Wasting Time on Diplomacy With the USA, Focus All Energy on Beijing, Delhi and Others
Marko Marjanović

RT
Berlin warns US against interference into EU affairs, rejects sanctions pressure

Russia Insider
The Deep State Holds a Public Brain Storm About Their Plans for Syria - It Is Alarming

A Political Junkie

China to buy $50 billion in U.S. farm products in return for tariff concessions-U.S. sources — Jeff Mason, Andrea Shalal, David Lawder

Nothingburger. DJT folded in face of economic consequences in an election year. He is a shoe-in in 2020 unless the economy tanks. The Democrats have nothing (but Bernie and they are not going to run him). 

But this is hardly the end of it. The US is still fully committed to stopping China's rise, which is an impossibility.

Reuters
China to buy $50 billion in U.S. farm products in return for tariff concessions-U.S. sourcesJeff Mason, Andrea Shalal, David Lawder

Moon of Alabama The Impeachment Deal Between — The House And The Senate

I think this is correct, and if it is the question arises, why a deal? The political answer is simple. Both bases require it. The Democratic "resistance" requires impeachment and the Trump base requires speedy acquittal. Everyone is satisfied and DJT wins, too. Hey, politics is all about winning.

Moon of Alabama
The Impeachment Deal Between The House And The Senate

Scot free? FBI declares it has no records of discipline against lawyers in Russia FISA case — John Solomon

Just days after it was sharply rebuked for its conduct in the Russia collusion investigation, the FBI is declaring it possesses no records of any disciplinary action taken against lawyers who pursued a deeply flawed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant targeting the Trump campaign.

The declaration was made Thursday in a U.S. District Court motionseeking to dismiss an open records lawsuit brought by the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm that frequently argues cases before the Supreme Court.

The foundation’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit sought any records from the FBI of actions taken with or communicated to the FISA judges or other disciplinary bodies against lawyers involved in the surveillance warrant that was obtained against Trump adviser Carter Page in October 2016 and renewed three times in 2017.

“The FBI informed Plaintiff that it was ‘unable to identify records responsive to’ the FOIA request,” the government’s motion seeking dismissal states. “Because the search requested by Plaintiff in the FOIA request and the Complaint has been conducted, Plaintiff’s claim is now moot.”

The FBI’s claim is certain to touch off new concerns amongst civil liberties experts and conservatives, who fear the bureau has not taken any disciplinary action against the lawyers and supervisors who submitted a deeply inaccurate, flawed application for the warrant....

"Inaccurate" and "flawed," or falsified?

John Solomon Report
Scot free? FBI declares it has no records of discipline against lawyers in Russia FISA case

John Solomon

Can We Impeach The FBI Now? — Peter Van Buren

On a personal note, if any of this is news to you, you may want to ask why you are only learning about it now. The American Conservative has been one of the few outlets that’s consistently exposed the Steele Dossier as part of an information op nearly since it was unveiled, and which has explained how the FISA court was manipulated, and which has steadily raised the question of political interference in our last election by American intelligence services. We claim no magical powers or inside information. To those of us who have been on the fringes of intelligence work, what was obvious just from the publicly available information was, well, obvious.

If you are reading any of this for the first time, or know people who are reading bastardized MSM versions of it for the first time, you might ask yourself why those outlets went along with Steele, et al. Their journalists are no dumber or smarter than ours. They do, however, write with a different agenda. Keep that in mind as we flip the calendar page to 2020....

The so-called liberal side is still in the dark and in denial of this. I doubt that they will ever be able to take off the blinders and see the obvious.

The American Conservative
Can We Impeach The FBI Now?

Peter Van Buren, 24-year State Department veteran

The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media — Glenn Greenwald

JUST AS WAS TRUE when the Mueller investigation closed without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, Wednesday’s issuance of the long-waited report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives from the U.S. media were utter frauds.

Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI’s gross abuse of its power – its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence, and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.

If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course....

Glenn Greenwald reminds us that not only is the outrageous, it is nothing new. It's what security agencies do, both abroad and domestically. And no one is allowed to talk about it, the press tasked with the narrative in particular.

The Intercept
The Inspector General’s Report on 2016 FBI Spying Reveals a Scandal of Historic Magnitude: Not Only for the FBI but Also the U.S. Media
Glenn Greenwald

This is not isolated to the attempted soft coup, either.

Will anyone, ever get to be held responsible? If not, then the country is done. America's last test is the "impeachment" saga—if no one [coup plotters] gets an indictment and spends the rest of their lives behind bars for treason, there will be nothing to fall back in the remnants of once proud Republic. It will be over because the system ceases to operate. What comes after is a whole other story altogether.

Reminiscence of the Future
If Ain't Boeing, I Am.... Going.
Andrei Martyanov

The Hidden Hand — Charles S. (Sam) Faddis

The essence of a coup, which some might refer to as covert action, is the hidden hand. One does not announce that a foreign power is overthrowing the government and installing a new government. One pulls strings as if from behind a curtain, making events that are all part of a carefully orchestrated plan appear disconnected, spontaneous and serendipitous.

As I read through the recently released IG report for the second time, as someone with a great deal of experience in military and intelligence matters, I see that hand everywhere.

Not just the recently released report. Anyone that has been following this soft coup closely as it unfolded, as we have here at MNE, can't miss the not-so-hidden hand.

What the post reveals is that what Horowitz criticized as incompetence was actually related to manufacture the rationale for the coup attempt.

There was a conspiracy all right but not where the fingers pointed. It was the fingers themselves.

The president took on The Swap, otherwise known as The Blob, and encountered more resistance that he probably expected. It has consumed his presidency and undermined what was left of democracy in the US, making a mockery of press freedom, for instance, which is the foundation of liberal democracy. A liberal democracy depends on an informed electoral and that is negated by a compromised press whose job is shaping the narrative. One particular aspect of negation of press freedom is the unstated rule that the intelligence services shall never be mentioned without their instigation or approval even if the matter is not classified.

This is an excellent post by operational insider that knows the ropes. His account reads like a spy novel written by someone with intimate knowledge of espionage.

AND Magazine
The Hidden Hand
Charles S. (Sam) Faddis, Senior Partner- Artemis, LLC, former CIA operations officer with thirty years  of experience (retired 2008) in the conduct of intelligence operations in the Middle East, South Asia and Europe. Except it is not a novel. The post makes us wonder if some people are going to jail.

Taibbi nails it. While IG Horowitz found that the FBI had reason to pursue their investigation, he fails to pursue the grounds of the reason, which were apparently manufactured to conduct a coup against he democratically elected president. A strong element of the rationale for the coup was the DJT as not actually elected democratically since he conspired with the Russians to undermine the opposition candidate, HRC. As Taibbi shows that plot has exploded. It should have exploded as soon as it was known that the HRC campaign was behind the Steele dossier and that Carter Page was a CIA asset. 

Rolling Stone
The Steele Dossier Was Always a Joke

Matt Taibbi

Why China’s Mobile Coverage is Superior to that of the US — Zhang Chi

China treats Internet access as a public good and provides it universally as a public utility.

Actually, many countries have wider access to better connection at a more reasonable price than the US. The Internet in the US is another rent-extraction machine.

The US puts its public monies into the war machine and black budget paramilitary.

China is arguably wise to do this rather than "generous." The basis for a developed society, including the economy, is security, social cohesion, culture, institutions, and infrastructure. For a modern society this includes education and health care, and in the digital age, access to the Internet and digital technology.

Bill Totten's Weblog
Why China’s Mobile Coverage is Superior to that of the US

Zhang Chi via Global Times

Ramanan — Ha-Joon Chang — Economics For People

Lecture series on YouTube for your upcoming holiday edification.

The Case for Concerted Action
Ha-Joon Chang — Economics For People
V. Ramanan

Lucy Komisar — Browder challenges Der Spiegel

Browder gets caught out.

The Komisar Scoop
Browder challenges Der Spiegel
Lucy Komisar

Bill Mitchell — Discredited academic dinosaurs continue to seek relevance

As many mainstream macroeconomics try to reinvent themselves after their reputations were trashed during and in the aftermath of the GFC, some are still trying to stay relevant by recycling the usual trash about deficits, public debt and bond yields that defines the New Keynesian orthodoxy in macroeconomics. That approach has been emphatically exposed as fake knowledge by the fact that none of the predictions that can be derived from that framework have proven to be accurate. On December 9, 2019, the UK Guardian took a rest from imputing anti-semitist motives to Jeremy Corbyn and published a sort of dinosauric-type article from Kenneth Rogoff – Public borrowing is cheap but ramping up debt is not without risk. Yes, the same character that claimed during the crisis that there was a public debt threshold of 90 per cent of GDP, beyond which, governments would face insolvency. When it was discovered the spreadsheet they had used to come up with that conclusion had been incompetently (or fraudulently) manipulated and that the actual data did not show anything of the sort, Rogoff should have slunked off and shut his mouth forever. But that is not the way these characters operate. Memory is short. Their position as an agent for their elites is well paid. And so they keep recycling the nonsense. Eventually, their influence will decline. But as Max Planck noted in 1948 “Die Wahrheit triumphiert nie, ihre Gegner sterben nur aus”, which has been reduced to ‘science advances one funeral at a time’, which is not a verbatim translation but an accurate depiction of how change is slow to come to the academy....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Discredited academic dinosaurs continue to seek relevance
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Links — 11 Dec 2019

American Herald Tribune [the back story you aren’t being told]
Uyghur Genocide: The “Muslim Holocaust” in China

Mona Issa

Moon of Alabama
The FBI - Pushed By John Brennan - Lied To The Court Seven Times To Spy On The Trump Campaign

Oilprice
The Uncomfortable Truth Behind Iraq's Violent Protests
Global Risk Insights

Why Venezuela’s Production Rebound Is So Significant For Oil Markets
Irina Slav

FAIR
Papers Owned by Oligarchs Unsurprisingly Oppose a Wealth Tax
Jim Naureckas

SouthFront
Migrating “Chlorine Cylinder” And Bellingcat’s Investigations Of Assad “Chemical Weapons”

Bolivian Coup Government Calls Israel For Assistance in “Fighting Terrorists”

Strategic Culture Foundation
Preparing the Stage: A Flawed Prospectus for War, This Time With Iran
Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, and former British diplomat and senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy

Strategic Culture Foundation
NATO Secretary General Targets ‘Rising China’: Why Cold War Newspeak Never Went Away

Connie Chung

Strategic Culture Foundation
The Great American Shakedown

Chris Hedges

The Vineyard of the Saker
Is Western Media credible anymore?
Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed, Sinologist, ex-Diplomat, Academician, Researcher, member editorial board (World Scientific), Peace-activist, Geo-analyst, Non-Resident Fellow of CCG (Center for China and Globalization), Islamabad, Pakistan

Fort Russ News
Official: Cultivation of Opium in Afghanistan 50-Folded since US Invasion

Drago Bosnic

Irrussianality
Unprecedented brazenness
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

The Unz Review [far bigger than Bellingcat]
The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control

Edward Curtin

Sputnik International
US House Passes $738Bln 2020 Defence Spending Bill

McKinsey — Winning the race: China’s auto market shifts gears

There's a lot written lately about China's "collapsing" auto market as through the trade war were involved. The reality is that China started from zero and grew exponentially. Now that China has developed significantly, the pace of growth is falling off, as would be expected. Before long China is expected to approach the level of developed world where growth is based on population growth and replacement.

The big news is consolidation. The Chinese auto market is consolidating as smaller firms are being left behind by the giants, again as would be expected owing to economies of scale. This implies that market power is becoming more asymmetrical as competition decreases. The challenge then becomes anti-trust.

The post is a summary. The full report is available for download.

McKinsey
Winning the race: China’s auto market shifts gears

Lars P. Syll — Blog Public trust in economists

Economists can take consolation that they beat politicians anyway.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Public trust in economists
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Can governments ever run out of money? — Howard Mustoe

BBC News has a fairly balanced article on MMT.

BBC News
Can governments ever run out of money?

Howard Mustoe

Franz Oppenheimer — The Law of Transformation and Social Market Economy Oleg Komlik

Oppenheimer’s Law of Transformation can be read as the paradox of cooperative economics and it refers to macro-social dynamics: the beginning of a cooperative group endeavor will end up in a capitalist calculation enterprise or cease to exist as long as the macro-social conditions are based on capitalist monetization and accounting. Knowledge is about predictability and wisdom is about outcome: the later Kibbutzim were from the Oppenheimer viewpoint a survival mechanism which will be inevitably followed by economic means of privatization.

This is another must-read. It's hardly an accident that this knowledge is again coming to a head after having been known at least since Marx & Engels as conditions that led to the previous two world wars are being recreated. I already said some time ago that WWIII has already begun. It just hasn't gone viral yet.

The problem is institutional, and it goes back 5000 years as the post describes. There seems to be no way out as long as money is used to produce commodities in order to make more money (Marx's M-C-M'). The problem is that money not only buys commodities but also result in asymmetric power through asymmetric control of the means of production. Oppenheimer’s nLaw of Transformation suggests that this cannot be remedied in a monetary production economy through co-ops.

Is there another alternative? Our resident Libertarian-Austrian commentator keeps reminding us of the economic calculation problem and socialist calculation debate that suggests not. Socialist experiments to date have not scaled. Franz Oppenheimer suggests that that even limited-scale attempts have ultimately transmogrified into capitalism.

I have suggested that two things are needed for a genuine transformation. The first is an observation that Karl Marx made in Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.

While I agree with the highlighted text, I would dispute the assertion of materialism. Materialism is the ontological underpinning of naturalism as the methodology of science as "true knowledge vs. opinion" in the ancient Greek sense of episteme vs. doxa that underlies the Western intellectual tradition.

As R. Buckminster Fuller pointed out, the wealth of humankind includes not only material wealth but also "metaphysical" wealth in the form of knowledge. While the former is finite, the latter is potentially infinite. In addition, to this there is also "spiritual" wealth in the form of everything that distinguishes humans. Fundamental to this is the ability to know and appreciate universality, where worldly knowledge is only a part of the story and not the greater part either. In addition to the cognitive faculties are the affective faculties, linked by the volitional faculty.

Thus, the second factor that comes into play in social transformation is the "spiritual" dimension, which can be considered either metaphysically or humanistically. For present purposes, the distinction can be disregarded, important as it may be otherwise. The important factor is that humans can not only know universally but also feel universally.

The level of collective conscious is revealed by the level of universality that the members of a society exhibit in behavior, culture and institutions. The present day level of collective consciousness is based on self-interest and this is reflected socially, political, and economically. Meher Baba elaborates on this in "The New Humanity." Some argue that this is just human nature, so get used to it. Others assert that the level of consciousness is malleable. Bucky Fuller showed that increasing electricity use has a profound effect, on one hand. On the other hand, raising the general level of education also affects the collective consciousness positively.

At a deeper level, the wisdom traditions of the world have asserted that consciousness can be transformed directly and have provided instructions on now to do so. These are being adopted increasingly.

For a transition away from predatory capitalism, two factors are needed. The first is a shift in the mode of production, which may be happening with the transition from the industrial age to the knowledge age. Dealing with climate change is also going to be a game-changer. The second is a transformation of the level of consciousness through a "spiritual awakening" such as has been suggested as coming in The Fourth Turing, for example.

Anyway, there is a lot to chew on in this post.

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
Franz Oppenheimer — The Law of Transformation and Social Market Economy
Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies

The Grayzone - Jeremy Corbyn faces Russiagate smear campaign before UK vote

This is excellent coverage from the Greyzone. The MI5, MI6, and CIA coup against Corbyn, and if he is elected, they will carry on trying to destabilise his government.

The British establishment make their money out of continuous wars and weapons sales to places like Saudi Arabia.


Just before British elections, the UK’s military-intelligence apparatus is smearing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with evidence-free Russiagate allegations. NATO-funded "researchers" are claiming that leaked documents publicized by Corbyn that exposed secret US-UK talks over the British health service are in fact the result of a Russian disinformation campaign. The Russia-baiting against Corbyn comes as the Labour leader also faces an ongoing campaign to smear him with fake charges of anti-Semitism. The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal discusses the British and US government-tied forces behind the anti-Corbyn effort, and how Bernie Sanders could be their next target.

The “Fixing Capitalism” Headfake — Yves Smith

Must -read. This places economic power front and center and shows how without addressing social, political, and economic the result of captialism is neo-feudalism.

Surprisingly, or may not so much, Yves Smith leaves out a major contribution of the universal employment guarantee by government, in which government guarantees to match a job with a person who is otherwise idle and wants to work. This removes the onerous aspect of capitalism that uses unemployment to discipline labor through the necessity to accept work on the terms of employers or starve. Thus, the market state is set against the welfare state in order to generate capitalist power.

Yves Smith at one time thought that the MMT JG was a policy recommendation that is optional. Bill Mitchell quickly set here straight that the JG is integral to MMT in that MMT is the only macroeconomic explanation that reconciles growth, employment and price stability, showing that it is possible to attain the holy grail of macro, optimal growth (full use of available resources), full employment less transitional, and moderate inflation.

The problem with the market state is asymmetric power that class networking, political power through the ability to capture the state, and asymmetry in market competition owing to market power and asymmetrical information are essential to capitalism as a system in order to support the profit rate.

Capitalism grows itself based on investment and investment is dependent on the profit rate to attract capital to productive investment instead of financial rent. The so-called savings glut is about preference for rent income over risk-taking through productive investment. The great gains have been in technology largely owing to very generous intellectual property rights granted by a captured government and enforced by that government's legal institutions.

There is no fixing capitalism without addressing asymmetric power that gives capital (property ownership) control over labor (people) and land (the environment).

Naked Capitalism
The “Fixing Capitalism” Headfake
Yves Smith

See also at NC

Capitalism is based on expropriation of the commons through negative externality by capitalizing the gains and socializing the losses. Asking capital to deal with negative externality is like asking a 2-year old to clean itself up after eating.

To Resolve the Economic & Environmental Crisis, Do Not Bank On the Private Sector

On Gundlach's Misrepresentation Of MMT — Brian Romanchuk

The only interesting thing is why Gundlach so badly misses the mark. Two possible explanations appear to be.

• He watched the wrong videos. The concepts of MMT were presently either incorrectly, or in a fashion that would be misunderstood by someone with a conventional mindset.
• It is part of a deliberate strategy to push MMT outside the acceptable bounds of discourse. (For example, it is a signal that nobody working for Gundlach should mention MMT in internal meetings.) Although that sounds like a bit of far-fetched conspiracy theory, it was certainly how the mainstream economics profession historically reacted to things like Marxism. Certainly this explanation seems to be behind some of the misrepresentations of MMT by some mainstream economists (a popular pastime about a year ago now)....

 The other possibility is that he is just not that bright and can't think out of the box. 😮

Conventional thinkers adapt everything to their existing frameworks ("the box") and then are guided by their cognitive biases, especially confirmation bias. The bonds box is all about inflation, which those in the box think they understand — even though the Fed admits it has no good theory of inflation that accords with data over time.

Bond Economics
On Gundlach's Misrepresentation Of MMT
Brian Romanchuk

BBC: Howard Mustoe: Can governments ever run out of money?

In the UK and US, political parties are promising spending splurges to appease voters after a decade of squeezes.

MMT is going mainstream.

Whether it's more nurses, frozen tax promises, free broadband internet or more social housing in the UK; or tax cuts and green energy investments in America, public spending is set to surge.

This sudden abandonment of fiscal rectitude comes amid the rise in prominence of a way of thinking about money, spending and the economy - Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

According to its key architect, US businessman Warren Mosler, it is based on a simple idea - that countries that issue their own currencies can never run out of money in the same way a business or person can.

BBC

BBC: Howard Mustoe: Can governments ever run out of money?

Gundlach denounces MMT as pretzel logic on steroids

Gooooooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnddddddddddlllllllaaaaaaccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

Bond investor Gundlach denounces MMT as 'pretzel logic on steroids'https://t.co/9sMEcw46hC by @JuliaLaRoche pic.twitter.com/Zdhdv38wzx

— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) December 10, 2019

All these morons have is figurative language... its ALL they EVER have....

Minsky Explains Financial Instability — Michael Stevens

In this rare video from 1987 (there is very little surviving footage of Minsky discussing his work), Hyman Minsky summarizes his theory of the financial fragility at the heart of modern capitalist economies:

Multiplier Effect
Minsky Explains Financial Instability

Michael Stevens

Myriad of implications of acetyl-l-carnitine deficits in depression

Childhood stress or chronic childhood unhappiness can alter the gene expression resulting in chronic, severe, and treatment resistant forms of depression, as well as chronic mild depression, known as dythymia.

People with this disorder cannot manufacture acetyl-l-carnitine properly, but amazingly, supplementing with Acetyl-l-carnitine not only relieves the depression (and often within days), it can also repair the faulty gene expression leading to a lasting cure.

LAC - Acetyl-l-carnitine

That LAC treatment might reverse some of the epigenetic-based vulnerability could have enormous clinical implications. In the defeat-stress model, the low BDNF in the hippocampus is related to trimethylation of H3K27 (H3K27me3) that is not reversed by traditional ADs (even though they do reverse the BDNF changes and the behavioral deficits) (17, 18). Since LAC increases acetylation of H3K27, it raises the possibility of more permanent elimination of vulnerability to defeat-stress depression-like behaviors. This proposition could readily be tested in animals and pursued clinically.

To the extent that some vulnerability to depression is based on these early childhood experiences, LAC treatment could theoretically reverse that vulnerability in the long term in a fashion different from traditional ADs, which require continued prophylactic treatment to prevent recurrent depressions (6, 14). This clinical possibility is further bolstered by the findings that LAC can induce resilience in an animal model by increasing astroglial cysteine-glutamate exchangers and glutamate transporters in the ventral hippocampus (9). LAC can also increase the structural plasticity in the medial amygdala and reverse depressive-like behaviors in a chronic restraint-stress model (19). It also has positive effects on energy balance and insulin/glucose levels, suggesting positive effects on aspects of the metabolic syndrome (20), which is so prominent in many psychiatric disorders and may be a key driver of early mortality related to cardiovascular disease (6, 14). Bigio et al. (20) concluded that “agents such as LAC that regulate metabolic factors and reduce glutamate overflow could rapidly ameliorate depression and could also be considered for treatment of insulin resistance in depressed subjects.”

PNAS


Myriad of implications of acetyl-l-carnitine deficits in depression

MIKE MCRAE - Your Environment Could Be Changing Your IQ on a Genetic Level, Study Finds

By ensuring the lower and underclasss get a higher quality of life, people can become more productive, brighter, and happier, which can increase economic output, reduce crime, drink, drug abuse, and save society money in the long run.

Poverty can set to a viscous circle which can run on for generations due to epigenetics, also known as gene expression.

These two mice below are genetic clones, but the vitamins and food they were given was different.

Our first few years of life play a crucial role in our brain's wiring. New research suggests our experiences might also be influencing changes in our neurons at a genetic level.

A 2018 study has discovered that when mice pups are neglected by their mother, it appears to trigger 'jumping' genes in their brain cells. This hints at similar processes in humans that could help explain the development of certain neurological disorders.

Your Environment Could Be Changing Your IQ on a Genetic Level, Study Finds BY MIKE MCRAE

Global Money Notes #26 Countdown to QE4? — Zoltan Pozsar

Repo.

Credit Suisse
Global Money Notes #26 Countdown to QE4?

Zoltan Pozsar

The debt delusion — Michael Roberts [book review]

Michael Roberts reviews and critiques The Debt Delusion by John Weeks.

Michael Roberts Blog — blogging from a marxist economist
The debt delusion
Michael Roberts

As Secret Pentagon Spending Rises, Defense Firms Cash in — Marcus Weisgerber

Black budget.

Defense One

As Secret Pentagon Spending Rises, Defense Firms Cash in

Marcus Weisgerber

Economics Intersect
The World's Biggest Arms-Producing Companies
Niall McCarthy