CMR is the leading provider of funding and management support for small to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs 

It was perhaps only a matter of time before European leaders attempted to leverage ongoing anti-war protests in Ukraine to call for regime change. Emboldened Baltic NATO countries have been at the forefront of increasing rhetoric and measures punishing Russians.

And now Lithuania's foreign minister is openly calling for Russians to tap into collective anger over last week's partial mobilization order and overthrow President Vladimir Putin. "Lithuanians overthrew the Soviet regime, Ukrainians overthrew (former Ukrainian President Viktor) Yanukovych, Iranian women have risen up against the brutality of the Iranian regime and Russians can overthrow Putin," FM Gabrielius Landsbergis tweeted.

"Let’s not underestimate the power of freedom," he followed with, but at the same time emphasized his country would not be letting fleeing Russians in, nor will they receive asylum.

Days prior Landsbergis had said, "Lithuania will not be granting asylum to those who are simply running from responsibility. Russians should stay and fight. Against Putin."

The past week has witnessed large protests in various Russian cities, but especially in outlying ethnic minority districts, in response to the call-up of some 300,000 reservists. There have been conflicting reports of Russian men getting conscripted to go join the fight in Ukraine as well, but Kremlin officials have denied that draft notices are going out.

Meanwhile The Associated Press has estimated that over the past days some 194,000 Russians have fled on fears of being called up for military service in the Ukraine conflict. Border crossings, including into Mongolian and central Asian nations, have been reportedly jammed by long traffic lines. 

Lithuania will not be granting asylum to those who are simply running from responsibility. Russians should stay and fight. Against Putin.

— Gabrielius Landsbergis???? (@GLandsbergis) September 23, 2022

The Georgian border has been especially busy, with satellite images showing lines of cars that surpass 10 miles through winding mountain roads.

This week, for the first time the White House issued a statement which seemed to encourage Russians to apply for asylum with the US. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday, "We believe that regardless of their nationality, they may apply for asylum in the United States and have their claim educated on a case by case basis."

Authored by Alastair Crooke,

Any political solution – however theoretical, at this point – would involve Moscow sitting with the collective West. Kiev had become a bystander.

Russia is preparing for an escalation in this war. She is augmenting her forces to the minimum level that could deal with a major NATO offensive. This decision was not precipitated by a significant attrition in the existing force. The facts are clear: The militias of Donetsk and Luhansk represent the majority of the Russian allied forces fighting in the Donbas. The militias have been reinforced by contract soldiers from the Wagner Group and Chechen fighters however, rather than by regular Russian forces.

But this is about to change. The number of Russian regulars fighting in Ukraine will rise dramatically. However, the referenda in the Ukrainian oblasts come first; and those will be followed by the Government of Russia and the Duma accepting the results and approving the annexation of these territories. After that is concluded and the territories assimilated into Russia, any attack on the new Russian territories would be treated as an act of war against Russia. As former Indian diplomat, MK Bhadrakumar, notes, “The accession of Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye creates a new political reality and Russia’s partial mobilisation on parallel track is intended to provide the military underpinning for it”.

Clearly, we – the world – are at a pivotal moment.

‘Collective Russia’ has concluded that the former low-intensity war is no longer viable:

Unimaginable flows of western $ billions; too many NATO fingers in the Ukraine pie; too wide a ‘Ho Chi Minh Trail’ of ever more long-range and advanced weaponry; and too many ‘delusions’ that Kiev can still somehow win – effectively have undercut any ‘off-ramp solution’ and portend inexorable escalation.

Well, ‘Collective Russia’ has decided to ‘get ahead of the curve’, and to bring the affairs of Ukraine to the crunch. It is a risk; that is why we have reached an inflection point. The $64 thousand dollar question is, what will be the studied reaction of western political leaders to Putin’s speech? The next weeks will be crucial.

The point here is that western leaders ‘claim’ that Putin is just bluffing – as he is losing. Western hype is ‘shooting the moon’: “Putin is panicked; Russian markets are falling; young men are fleeing conscription”. Yes, well the Moex Russia index closed higher on Thursday; the rouble has remained steady; and the big queues are at the recruitment offices, rather than airline offices.

Just to be clear: The limited mobilization Putin announced only applies to those who serve in Russia’s reserves and who have seen prior military service. It is unlikely to hobble the economy.

The Russian pre-planned, tactical withdrawal from Kharkov – though militarily sound in logic, given the troop numbers required to defend a 1,000 km border – has generated throughout the West a fantasy of panic in Moscow and of Russian forces fleeing Kharkov before an advancing Ukrainian offensive.

The danger to such fantasies is that leaders begin to believe their own propaganda. How could western Intelligence reporting become so divorced from reality? One reason undoubtedly is the explicit decision to craft ‘cherry-picked’ intelligence to serve as deliberately ‘leaked’ anti-Russian propaganda. And where would be the best quarry for such propaganda material? Kiev. It seems that largely, intelligence services come to accept and circulate what Kiev says, without cross-checking for accuracy.

Yes, it is hard to believe (but not without precedent). Politicians naturally love what seems to bolster their narratives. Contrarian assessments are met with scowls.

Therefore, western leaders are doubling down on promises to continue sending money and advanced weaponry to Ukraine that will be used to attack – among others – Russian civilians. A new co-ordinated narrative from the West is that whereas on the Russian side, one man can end the war; on the other, for Ukraine to stop the war would mean ‘no Ukraine’.

Neocons, such as Robert Kagan, naturally have put their own spin on the official psyops, by pushing the line that Putin is bluffing. Kagan wrote in Foreign Affairs:

“Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it [the nuclear risk] has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world.”

In short, don’t worry about going to war with Russia, Putin won’t use ‘the bomb’. Really?

Again, to be plain, Putin said in his speech on 21 September:

“They [Western leaders] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail … [I refer] to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia”.

“I would like to remind … in the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country, and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff”.

These Neocons advocating ‘hard deterrence’ rotate in and out of power, parked in places like the Council on Foreign Relations or Brookings or the AEI, before being called back into government. They have been as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House, as the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended, and the world remains binary – ‘us and them, good and evil’.

Of course, the Pentagon does not buy the Kagan meme. They well know what nuclear war implies. Yet, the EU and U.S. political élites have chosen to place all their chips on the roulette wheel landing on ‘Ukraine’:

Ukraine’s symbolic expression now serves multiple ends: Principally, as distraction from domestic failures – ‘Saving Ukraine’ offers an (albeit false) narrative to explain the energy crisis, the spiking inflation and businesses shutting down. It is icon too, to the framework of the ‘enemy within’ (the Putin whisperers). And it serves to justify the control regime currently being cooked-up in Brussels. It is, in short, politically highly useful. Even perhaps, existentially essential.

Russia thus has taken the first step towards a real war footing. The west will be well advised to acknowledge and understand how this situation came about, rather than to pretend to its public that Russia is on the verge of collapse – which it is not.

How did ‘collective Russia’ arrive at this point? How do the pieces fit together?

The first piece to this jigsaw is Syria: Moscow intervened there with a tiny commitment – some 25 Sukhoi fighters and no more than 5,000 men. There, as with Ukraine, the operation was one of giving support to frontline forces. In Ukraine, through aiding the Donbas militia to defend themselves – and in Syria, through offering the Syrian army air-support, intelligence and mediation outreach to those with whom Damascus was not talking.

The other key piece to understanding Russia’s Syria ‘posture’ was that Moscow could rely for the cutting-edge ground-fighting on two highly skilled, and motivated fighting auxiliaries, in addition to the mainstream Syrian army: i.e. Hizbullah and the IRGC.

Taken together, this Russian intervention – limited to a supporting role only – nevertheless yielded political results. Turkey mediated; and the Astana Accord resulted. Notwithstanding that Astana has not been a great success – but its framework lives on.

The point here is that Moscow’s deployment in Syria ultimately was politically oriented towards a political solution.

Fast-forward to Ukraine: The militias of Donetsk and Luhansk represent the majority of the Russian-allied forces doing the fighting in the Donbas. The militias are reinforced by contract soldiers from the Wagner Group and Chechens fighters. This explains why Russian losses of 5,800 KIA, during the SMO are ‘small’. Russian forces were rarely on the frontlines of this war. (In Syria they were not on the frontlines at all.)

So, the Syria blueprint effectively was lifted aloft, and fitted down over Ukraine. What does this tell us? It suggests that originally Team Putin was angulated towards a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, just as in Syria. And it almost happened. Turkey again mediated, with peace talks occurring in Istanbul in late March, with promising results showing.

In one respect however, events here did not follow the Syria pattern. Boris Johnson immediately scuttled the settlement initiative, warning Zelensky that he must not ‘normalise’ with Putin; and if he did reach some accord, it would not be recognised by the West.

After this episode, the SMO nonetheless continued in its highly restricted format (with no signs of any political solution on the horizon). It persisted, too, despite growing evidence that taking down the defences that NATO had spent eight years erecting in Donbas likely were beyond the militia capabilities. In short, the SMO was demonstrating its limitations: what worked in Syria, was not working in Ukraine.

More forces plainly were required. Could this be done by tweaking the SMO (which imposed legal constraints on Russian regular forces serving in Ukraine), or was a complete re-set required? What resulted was the limited mobilisation and referenda outcome.

Plainly, however the decision to assimilate Ukrainian territory would foreclose on a likely political settlement, but this latter possibility was falling away anyway as the West fell for its fantasies of a Ukrainian complete victory, and as NATO escalated.

The ‘war’ was becoming less and less about Ukraine, and more and more NATO’s war on Russia.

Any political solution – however theoretical, at this point – would involve Moscow sitting with the collective West. Kiev had become a bystander.

Well, this was the point at which other geo-politics thrust itself into the equation: Russia, under sanctions, must pursue a strategy of building-out a protected ‘strategic depth’ that trades in own currencies (outside the dollar hegemony). MacKinder called this sphere the ‘World Island’ – a land-based mass, well distanced from the naval Great Powers.

Russia needs the support of BRICS and the SCO as partners both in creating this ‘trading strategic depth’, and for the multi-polar world order project. Some of its leaders though – particularly China and India – mindful of the SCO’s 2001 founding charter – naturally could have difficulty in lending public support to Russia’s Ukraine plans.

Yes, China and India are sensitive to interventions in other states, and Team Putin has worked hard, continually briefing its allies on Ukraine, so that they could understand the full background to the conflict. The summit at Samarkand was the final ‘piece’ – the personal briefing of what was to come in respect to Ukraine that needed to fall into place.

How will the West react? With a public display of ‘fury’ for sure; yet despite the hype, some fundamental realities will have to be addressed: Does Ukraine, with its severely abraded forces, have the wherewithal to continue this war after the loss of so many men? Is Europe even able to mobilise towards a larger NATO war against Russia? Do the U.S. and Europe retain a sufficient inventory of munitions, after so much has already been passed into the hands of Kiev?

The next crucial weeks will provide answers.

An analysis of official data reveals that a record number of New York residents changed their driver's licenses to Florida last month.

According to the New York Post, a total of 5,838 New Yorkers made the switch in August - the second-highest number for a single month in recorded history - and which makes for a year-to-date figure of 41,885 New Yorkers who have abandoned their northern licenses after moving south - a pace which points to a new annual record.

"First it was the billionaires. Then it was the rich following behind them. Now you have the middle class," said Renowned fashion designer Alvin Valley, who moved his primary residence to Palm Beach during the pandemic, adding that the influx of residents has been 'staggering.'

"A lot of families just began to feel like New York was becoming unlivable," Valley continued. "Especially for younger couples with kids in their 30s and 40s. They don’t want to get on the subway. It’s a safety issue, it’s a schools issue."

A retired NYPD lieutenant who moved with his family to Jacksonville last year told The Post that New Yorkers still have a buffet of reasons to bid farewell.

John Macari blamed COVID-19 mandates, rising crime and unappealing schools for the continued departures.

He argued that vaccine mandates for public-sector employees left thousands of working-class New Yorkers disillusioned with city government and eyeing the exits.

“Couple that with the rise in crime and zero competence from our elected officials and a lot of people just don’t see a future in New York City for themselves,” Macari said.

The Brooklyn native, who runs a Jacksonville livery service staffed by retired NYPD cops and hosts a podcast featuring ex-officers, said he talks to friends every day who want out. -NY Post

Last month, New York Mayor Eric Adams tried to stem the flow - deploying digital billboards throughout Florida to try and convince ex-New Yorkers to return to the Big Apple.

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Last week I had the immense pleasure of interviewing my good buddy George Gammon from Rebel Capitalist.

George is one of my favorite economic commentators and has been a friend of mine, and my podcast, for years. He is focused on Austrian economics, skepticism about the global elite and Central Banking, and trying to help preserve wealth in the out-of-control world of Central Banks we exist in. 

In our recent interview, we discussed:

• What inflation numbers will look like at the end of the year, and why George thinks CPI numbers will hit a lull

• George’s favorite indicator for measuring whether we’re in a recession and whether or not the Fed is going to reverse course “within weeks”

• Black swan events George is watching that could hurt the markets, other than rising rates

• China’s Covid policy and what alternate reasoning there may be for it, other than Covid

• China and Russia posturing up together

• Energy shortages and food shortages

• Whether we are truly on the fringe of a massive earthquake geopolitically and economically

• The dollar going up and what it means

• Covid policy in the U.S. and getting ahead of the “narrative” when new uncomfortable situations take hold domestically

First we talked about where George thought inflation was heading. Surprisingly, he said lower - before moving higher.

“I rarely make predictions, but I did make one prediction: inflation would go down slightly as measured by CPI in Q3 or Q4,” George told me. “Most likely it probably goes back up [after falling to 6% or 7%].”

“I saw the things that created the inflation in the first place, now the question is how they do that. I don’t know if the supply chains will get better anytime soon,” he continued. “But they did stop the stimmy checks.”

From there we moved on to talk about his favorite indicator for recessions and how Austrian economists are often ignored - and sometimes even ridiculed - in the mainstream media. 

“That’s usually the indicator that you’re currently in a recession. Though I think we’re already in one as a result of two negative quarters of GDP growth,” he says, talking about his favorite metric.

We talked about how the current state of the global economy and geopolitics may have us on the precipice of things changing meaningfully, relatively permanently:

We also talked about the tensions between China, Taiwan and the United States.

“As far as black swans, I’m looking at the issue of China and Taiwan. What Nancy Pelosi did was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen a politician do,” George says.

“If you look at it through the lens of the Chinese, you can see historically why they are doing it,” George says. “I can’t imagine that Pelosi or Biden would do something for the long-term benefit of the Untied States, they’re just doing whatever is politically expedient.”

George also thinks China is using Covid policy to prepare the country for war, something I started a discussion on earlier this month: “China’s policy on Covid is another head scratcher. The only conclusion I can come to is they’re trying to prepare their society for using far fewer resources in the future because they know there’s a good probability they will go to war with the United States.”

“Looking at China’s history, it would make sense that that’s an edge they think they have: they have benevolent dictator so they can make long-term decisions, central thinking and a plan for the whole country, their ability to just have patience.”

“They look at the U.S. and say ‘its just collapsing internally’,” George argues.

“Another black swan is the dollar going up,” George says. “This creates a massive amount of economic pressure on countries outside the U.S. In a global economy, there’s a lot of systemic risk. I don’t know what the number is - 120, 130, 140 - but at some point, its going the be the United States’ problem. It’s going up because of all of this uncertainty and interest rates. The bond market is saying the Fed will raise for another 6 months or a year. So we’ve got another year of the dollar going up?"

“You have this combined with all these powder keg situations geopolitically,” George says.

“I think we’ll wind up in a Plaza Accord 2.0. I think the black swan could be that they miscalculate,” he says.

Finally we discuss some of my recent findings on Covid, including a new preprint study talking about how boosters aren’t ethically justifiable in younger adults and a recent thread by Dr. Richard Ebright, PhD, from Rutgers, explaining why he thinks the Covid “lab leak” theory holds water:

George was one of the first people to speak out about Covid measures, even before we knew about the virus. 

"It was actually on your podcast, you asked me point blank what we should do [about Covid breaking out]. It was a difficult question to answer - we didn't have any information at the time other than we knew it was spreading quickly. I said that 'I don't know how bad it's going to get, but we have to let people make their own decisions. If people want to go outside, let them go outside. We have to give people as much information as possible but then let them make their own decisions'," George recalled. 

---

If you are not yet a subscriber & want to support my work, I’d love to offer you 50% off for life to subscribe today: Get 50% off forever

---

You can listen to the full interview here:

The latest real-time rent data from the property research firm CoStar Group shows apartment rents in the US are fading from record highs for the first time in almost two years, according to WSJ. 

CoStar said national US rents in August fell .1% from July. It was the first monthly drop since December 2020 -- a sign rents may have finally peaked. 

Two other property research firms, Rent.com and Realtor.com, recorded slight monthly rent declines last month. 

Monthly rent declines are still minuscule compared with the 23% increase since August 2020, according to Realtor.com. 

Orphe Divounguy, an economist at Zillow Group, said there's no guarantee that rents peaked because soaring mortgage rates have unleashed an affordability crisis where households are being priced out of owning and forced to rent. 

Meanwhile, CoStar forecasts more rental market cooling this fall and winter. They say September rents are expected to decline for the second consecutive month. Some analysts expect rents to continuing decreasing on a monthly basis through the end of this year -- that would be a drastic change from the same period in 2021 when rents soared. 

We outlined first in Some Good News: Rents Have Finally Peaked As Rental Market Enters "Widespread Cooldown" and then Some More Good Inflation News: Owner-Equivalent Rents Are About To Peak that rental hyperinflation peaked earlier this year and would continue to slow through the end of the year. 

WSJ noted seasonality, new apartment construction, and unaffordable rents are some factors cooling rental markets. 

Further hints about the rental market were heard from one of the largest owners of multifamily units in the US, Starwood Capital Group, whose CEO, Barry Sternlicht, told CNBC:

"The pace of rent increases, we're seeing it go down month-to-month."

Last week, we noted that Manhattan's red hot rental market finally plateaued after six months of "record number of records" as median rent in the borough peaked in July at $4,150 and slid in August to $4,100. 

Perhaps what's happening in NYC is a sign US rental market slowdown could gain momentum in the months ahead. 

Authored by Julie Ponese via The Epoch Times,

3, 2, 1... Timber! A Philosopher’s Take on the Collapse of Our Civilization

The clock seems to be ticking.

Growing disparities in wealth, a housing and gas crisis, transhumanism galloping over the horizon, heroized incivility, and the constant threat of viruses, the “cures” for which may be worse than the diseases. Global politics feels eerily apocalyptic these days and, in our own little worlds, many of us are so lost, so unmoored from the comforts of our pre-pandemic lives, that we don’t know which end is up or what the future will hold. Investigative journalist Trish Wood recently wrote that we are living the fall of Rome (though it’s being pushed on us as a virtue).

I wonder, are we falling as Rome did? Is it possible that our civilization is on the verge of collapse? Not imminent collapse, perhaps, but are we taking the initial steps that civilizations before ours took before their eventual downfalls? Will we suffer the fates of the Indus, the Vikings, the Mayans, and the failed dynasties of China?

As a philosopher, I need first to understand what we mean by “civilization” and what it would mean for that thing to collapse.

This is a significant conceptual hurdle. “Civilization” (from the Latin civitas, meaning a body of people) was first used by anthropologists to refer to a “society made up of cities” (Mycenae’s Pylos, Thebes, and Sparta, for example). Ancient civilizations were typically non-nomadic settlements with concentrated complexes of persons who divided labor. They had monumental architecture, hierarchical class structures, and significant technological and cultural developments.

But just what is our civilization? There isn’t a tidy line between it and the next in the way the Mayans’ and the Greeks’ coexistence was defined by the ocean between them. Is the concept of Western civilization—rooted in the culture that emerged from the Mediterranean basin over 2,000 years ago—still meaningful, or has globalization made any distinction between contemporary civilizations meaningless? “I am a citizen of the world,” wrote Diogenes in the fourth century B.C. But of course, his world wasn’t quite as vast as our own.

Now for the second issue: civilization collapse. Anthropologists typically define it as a rapid and enduring loss of population, socio-economic complexity, and identity.

Will we suffer a mass loss of population or socio-economic complexity? Perhaps. But that isn’t what concerns me. What I really worry about is our loss of identity. I worry that we’ve lost the plot, as they say, and that with all our focus on the ability of science to save us, we’ve lost our ideals, our spirit, our reasons for being. I worry we are suffering what Betty Friedan called “a slow death of the mind and spirit.” I worry that our nihilism, our façadism, our progressivism are incurring a debt that we may not be able to pay.

As the eminent anthropologist Sir John Glubb wrote (pdf), “The life-expectation of a great nation, it appears, commences with a violent, and usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.”

Think of a civilization as the top step on a staircase, with each stair below having fallen away. Western civilization today is built largely on the foundational ideals of ancient Greece and Rome that endure long after their physical structures and governments disappeared. But they endure because we find them meaningful. They endure through literature and art and conversation and ritual. They endure in how we marry, how we write about one another, and how we care for our sick and aging.

One lesson history tries to teach us is that civilizations are complex systems—of technology, economics, foreign relations, immunology, and civility—and complex systems regularly give way to failure. The collapse of our civilization is almost certainly inevitable; the only questions are when, why, and what will replace us.

But this brings me to another point. Early in its usage, anthropologists started using “civilization” as a normative term, distinguishing “civilized society” from those who are tribal or barbaric. Civilizations are sophisticated, noble, and morally good; other societies are uncivilized, backward, and unvirtuous.

But the old distinction between civilization and barbarism has taken on a new form in the 21st century. It is from within our own “civilized” culture that emerges an inversion of the concepts of civility and brutishness. It is our leaders, our journalists, and our professionals who ignore the standards of rational discourse, who institutionalize hatred and incite division. Today, it is the elites who are the true barbarians among us.

Taking a cue from Walt Whitman, who thought his own 19th century America was waning, “We had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease.”

If our civilization collapses, it won’t be because of an outside attack, like Bedouin charging in from the desert. It will be because of those among us who, like parasites, destroy us from within. Our civilization may collapse and it could be due to any number of factors—war, the economy, natural disasters—but the silent killer, the one that may get us in the end, is our own moral catastrophe.

The ultimate problem, therefore, is not interpersonal; it’s inner-personal. If our civilization is collapsing, it’s because something in each of us is collapsing. And we need to rebuild ourselves first, brick by brick, if we are to have a chance of rebuilding ourselves together.

Trading volumes for nonfungible tokens (NFTs) has tumbled 97% since January, when the blockchain-bound digital art and collectibles market went from $17 billion to just $466 million in September, according to Bloomberg, citing data from Dune Analytics.

The dropoff in NFT interest is part of a wider, $2 trillion wipeout in crypto - which has come a long way from $69 million art auctions and Lamborghinis with crypto-themed license plates.

pic.twitter.com/sllc4i6jap

— NFT Bros Taking Ls (@FungersTakingLs) September 26, 2022

As ArtNet's Dorian Batycka wondered on Tuesday, will digital art collectors stay away?

From SNL to Snoop Dogg, NFTs quickly took popular culture by storm. Athletes and celebrities aped-in; some shilled and rug-pulled their fans. Others made genuine contributions to the space, like when Grammy award-winning producer Timbaland made NFTs of stems to his beats—buyers were given the rights to remix and profit from them.

Now, most of that initial hype has collapsed, thanks in part to the cantankerous crypto market. Pieces once bought for millions now barely muster a couple hundred thousand at auction. The auction platforms are not doing much better: OpenSea, the largest of them all, laid off 20 percent of its staff in July 2022. Sales volume is significantly down. An extremely muted sale earlier this year of generative art (digital art made with autonomous software) at Phillips showed that collectors are no longer as keen.

As the NFT art market faces a recalibration, what will become of the market for digital and physical art—the so-called “phygital”? -ArtNet

That said, NFT projects continue making headway - such as Yuga Labs, which last month announced a partnership with Tiffany's & Co. for 250 custom-made cryptopunk jeweled pendants which sold quickly for $50,000 each.

So, while things in crypto land certainly appear tumultuous at the moment, one has to wonder if the NFT space is due for a massive reflation once the fed restarts QE and digital currencies hit astronomical prices again.

Authored by Tamir Tehari via The Gatestone Institute,

But what is it for? This is the question that the media in Russia, China, Iran and half a dozen countries were posing all last week in the wake of a summit in Samarkand that brought their leaders together as members or aspiring members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The Russian media, echoing President Vladimir Putin's speech at the summit, say the SCO is designed to end "the unipolar world "by creating a "multipolar system".

The Chinese media offer a different version.

The SCO is meant to offer a new political system for the whole world as an alternative to the Western democratic model.

To the Islamic media in Tehran, celebrating the Islamic Republic's admission to the club after 11 years of supplication, the SCO is an extension of the "Resistance Front" created to contain and defeat the American "Great Satan."

A closer look, however, might show that the SCO is form without a clear content, an empty frame which different artists could project different fantasies.

The SCO was created in 1996 as the Shanghai Five bringing together China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan together for two purposes:

1. Delineating China's borders with Russia and the three ex-Soviet republics.

2. Fighting "Islamic terrorism" which affected China in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), Russia in Chechnya, and Tajikistan in Kulyab and Kyrgyzstan in the Fergana Valley.

A quarter of a century later, neither of those goals has been achieved.

Russia's long border with China, which includes vast stretches of Chinese territory annexed by the Soviet Union in two border wars in the 1960s, remains undesignated. China has also failed to persuade Tajikistan to cede a chunk of land needed to widen the corridor Beijing has with Pakistan. (Beijing is now trying to 'buy' the Wakhan Corridor from Afghanistan for the same purpose.) Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan also have failed to demarcate their borders. (The two neighbors fought a border war on the eve of the Samarkand summit.) At the same time, China has long maintained a claim on large chunks of Kazakhstan, which Russia annexed under the tsars.

Uzbekistan, another former Soviet republic, joined the group in 1997 to get help against terrorism led by the Islamic Liberation Party. But it, too, has complex irredentist problems with Tajikistan. In fact in ethnic and cultural terms, Samarkand, where the summit was held, is the largest Tajik city in the world. In exchange, the Kulyab area in Tajikistan has an Uzbek majority.

The SCO's identity as a club of queer fellows has been further emphasized by the admission of a host of new members all of whom have territorial disputes with each other. India has fought two border wars with China, losing large chunks of territory in Ladakh and Kashmir. It has also had four wars with its Pakistani neighbor, losing a chunk of land in Ran-e-Kuch but succeeding in splitting Pakistan by creating Bangladesh.

To make the club even more queer, other nations with troubles of their own are lined up for membership. These include Azerbaijan and Armenia, currently at war against one another; Nepal, torn between India and China; Sri Lanka, where the very word Chinese provokes intense hatred; Turkey, which is fighting Russian surrogates in Libya and Syria; Belarus, which has become an extension of Putinistan; and Mongolia. which cannot swallow the Chinese occupation of Inner Mongolia. Perhaps the only would-be member of the club without such impediments is Cambodia.

Casting himself as the leader of a new "pole", Putin has also spoken about inviting four Arab countries plus the Maldives to join the club.

Some Western commentators have dubbed the SCO "a new power bloc". That may be jumping the gun a bit. SCO members are more dependent on trade with the European Union, the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia than with each other.

In 2020, exchanges within the SCO orbit accounted for less than 15 percent of their total foreign trade.

To be sure, that could change because offering huge discounts, Russia, currently the largest producer of oil and gas in the world, is making a big entry into the two largest markets for energy, China and India. But that is happening at the expense of Iran and Iraq, which are also losing their Turkish market to Russia.

In any case, this new trend could create a neo-colonial relationship in which Russia exports raw material to China and imports manufactured goods and business services.

But even then the alliance of which Putin dreams won't be easy to shape because of deep cultural divides. Moscow has not forgotten the 1967 attack on its embassy in Beijing and over a decade of anti-Russian propaganda that followed. The fact that China's President Xi Jinping refused to endorse Russia's invasion of Ukraine punctured the balloon that Putin had hoped to float.

Putin had been careful not to mention Ukraine in Samarkand, in the hope that he could later claim to have received "full support" in private meetings with the leaders present.

That ploy failed when the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shook a finger at Putin, saying "This war must end! This is no time for war!" Putin was forced to say he understood Modi's "concerns", and deceitfully promising to work for ending the war.

(An hour later, however, he told Russian TV that he didn't care how long the war might last!)

It would be good news if the SCO succeeds in persuading its members to resolve their territorial disputes and bury their hatchets. Sadly, however, the various members of this strange club seem to be motivated by different, often contradictory and seldom the best, motives.

The Samarkand club represents some 40 percent of the world's population and over 20 percent of the global GDP, not to mention four of the 9 nations with nuclear arsenals. Yet, it seems unlikely to become an anchor of stability in Eurasia; its members are more interested in petty schemes than grand ideas of peace and cooperation.

Their rhetoric reminds one of a character in James Elroy Flecker's 19th century play "The Golden Road to Samarkand", Ishak, a notorious black-marketeer, who tries to soft-soap the city's gate-keepers into admitting his caravan with these lines:

"We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known,
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand."

Politico's new owner may lean right, but the rag's founding editor, John F. Harris, said in a Thursday column that the Constitution must be rewritten to stop former President Donald Trump - who he calls a "constitutional menace" who exploited the Constitution's "defects" in order to win the 2016 US election.

"Correcting or circumventing what progressives reasonably perceive as the infirmities of the Constitution, in fact, seems likely to be the preeminent liberal objective of the next generation. Progress on issues ranging from climate change to ensuring that technology giants act in the public interest will hinge on creating a new constitutional consensus. Trying to place more sympathetic justices on the Supreme Court is not likely to be a fully adequate remedy," Harris wrote, adding "There are more fundamental challenges embedded in the document itself — in particular the outsized power it gives to states, at a time when the most urgent problems and most credible remedies are national in character."

Harris mocked conservatives' 'solemn reverence' for the Constitution, suggesting that it's " become a way of signaling right-mindedness across the political spectrum, even among Trump supporters whose actions plainly undermine constitutional order. In much of this rhetoric, the Constitution is elevated from a secular document to a sacred one, infused with mystical dimensions," he wrote.

Then he shreds the founding document.

"Another answer, however, is: Who cares what [the Founders] thought then? The Constitution was written at a time when states were indeed foundational — a central part of people’s identity and way of life. This has not been true for nearly a century, as both national government and national identity have become stronger," Harris continued, before listing several amendments that he says could already gain "majority support" for the nation - including "altering or abolishing the Electoral College, term limits for the Court, creating some check on abuse of the pardon authority," and rewriting "the infuriatingly murky language of the Second Amendment."

Harris worked for the Washington Post for two decades, covering the Clinton White House between 1995 and 2001. In 2007 he co-founded Politico with former partner Jim VandHei, who went on to co-found Axios.