Inequality, Interest Rates, Aging, and the Role of Central Banks
Bad things lead to more bad things. But (some) bad things can be fixed.
Here are three facts about the recent history of the world:
- Income has become more concentrated within societies. Both the shares of household income going to the top 1% and corporate profit shares have increased dramatically since the 1970s.
- Inflation-adjusted interest rates are much lower now across much of the world than they were in the early 1980s. That’s contributed to a surge in asset values relative to incomes—and likely means that future investment returns will be much lower than in the past.
- The human population has aged rapidly, with the global median age rising by about ten years since the early 1980s. The share of the population aged 65 and older in the high-income countries and China, which together account for the vast majority of global economic output, has already jumped from less than 7% in the 1970s to 13% today—and the United Nations projects that share will rise to 25% by 2060.
Two recent papers provide complementary explanations of the mechanisms at work. Adrien Auclert, Hannes Malmberg, Frédéric Martenet, and Matthew Rognlie focused on the demographic angle, while Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi focused on income inequality.2 Before digging into their specific arguments, a brief refresher on the basics. …
With Great Power Comes Great Fear
Here are three stories about how the stock market works.
The first story says that the stock market reflects the productivity of the underlying economy. When stocks go up, the thinking goes, everyone should celebrate because the tide of productivity is rising. This is the story that neoclassical economists believe.
The second story is that the stock market is actually disconnected from the ‘real’ economy, fluctuating in ways that have nothing to do with actual productivity. Stock prices represent ‘fictitious capital’. This is the story Marxists believe.
The third story is that stock prices are neither about productivity nor are they ‘fictitious’. They are about power. This is the hypothesis proposed by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. The basic idea is that what capitalist really care about is not productivity. They care about income. Capitalist look at their income and then, through the ritual of capitalization, turn it into a lump sum — the capitalized value.
What’s important, Nitzan and Bichler argue, is that capitalist income is a function of power — the power to wield property rights. Hence patent trolls earn income not by doing anything useful, but by enforcing their intellectual property. Likewise Microsoft earns income not by creating software, but by restricting its use. Of course you can produce things if you want. But unless you enforce your property rights, you won’t earn income.
Back to the stock market. Bichler and Nitzan propose that we should understand the stock market in terms of capitalist power. When stocks go up relative to wages, that’s a sign that capitalists have grown more powerful. Conversely, when stocks fall relative to wages, that’s a sign that workers are winning the class struggle.
With this thinking in mind, Bichler and Nitzan propose a metric they call the ‘power index’ — the ratio of stock prices to the average wage:
Higher Pay for Low-Income Workers Undercut by Years of Wage Stagnation and Rising Inflation
35 Million Americans Are Losing Unemployment Income Today
Cutting Unemployment Benefits Does Not Increase Employment
China on the cusp of a ‘profound transformation’
China's Marxist "Profound Revolution" Is Here, And Nobody In The West Is Ready
The writing is on the wall in China.
And the font is large.
Beijing’s regulatory crackdown is no flash in the pan and it’s not “limited” or “targeted” either. It’s an across-the-board effort to rein in the influence of capital, scrub society of perceived Western excess, re-establish discipline (broadly construed) and codify Xi’s “thought.” It is, apparently, a “profound revolution.”
The reality of this has yet to set in for Western investors and, frankly, I doubt it ever will. We live in a world where people don’t confront reality. Rather, they suspend disbelief indefinitely in order to avoid coming to terms with their own follies.
…
Meanwhile, the writing is on the wall for the Chinese economy too: It’s slowing down.
Michael Hudson: Soros' Dream: To Turn China Into A Neoliberal Grabitization Opportunity
In a Financial Times op-ed, “Investors in Xi’s China face a rude awakening” (August 30, 2021), George Soros writes that Xi’s “crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy. … Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise has been a significant drag on the economy.”
Translated out of Orwellian Doublethink, the “crackdown on private enterprise” means cutting back on what the classical economists called rent-seeking and unearned income. As for its supposed “drag on the economy,” Mr. Soros means the economy’s polarization concentrating wealth and income in the hands of the richest One Percent.
Soros lays out his plan for how U.S. retaliation may punish China by withholding U.S. funding of its companies (as if China cannot create its own credit) until China capitulates and imposes the kind of deregulation and de-taxation that Russia did after 1991. He warns that China will suffer depression by saving its economy along socialist lines and resisting U.S.-style privatization and its associated debt deflation.
….Soros gives his game away by stating that “Xi does not understand how markets operate.” What he means is that President Xi rejects rapacious rent-seeking, exploitative free-for-all, and shapes markets to serve overall prosperity for China’s 99 Percent. “As a consequence, the sell-off was allowed to go too far,” Soros continues. What he means is, too far to maintain the dominance of the One Percent. China is seeking to reverse economic polarization, not intensify it.
The Wheels Come Off: As Economic Growth Craters, NY Fed Suspends Its GDP Tracking Model
It's official: while Q2 was the best quarter for the economy in decades, in Q3 it is now widely accepted that as we wrote a month ago, the wheels came off as a result of a "sudden negative change." One doesn't have to look too hard to find out why: between today's catastrophic jobs report, the near record plunge in consumer confidence, the troubling contraction in retail sales where reports have missed expectations for 3 months in a row, whether it is due to the end of stimmies or the recent restrictions from the Delta variant, one bank after another took a machete, or in the case of Morgan Stanley, a nuke to their GDP Q3 forecast, with Goldman now expecting GDP to grow just by 3.5% this quarter, its second downgrade in a month (it was 8.5% just one month ago) while Morgan Stanley yesterday cut its Q3 GDP to just 2.9% from 6.5% previously.
Pento: The Great Deflation Of 2022
We’ve had some of the highest GDP growth rates in U.S. history over the past few months and the greatest increase in monetary largess since the creation of the Fed. But this is mostly all in the rearview mirror now.
Pilkington: Using Private Sector Data to Forecast Future CPI Moves
Time to Stop Believing Deficit Bullshit
What do you do if you have a philosophy that over the course of half a century, is continually proven wrong?
I do not mean a little bit off, or theoretically askew, but verifiably, factually, quantifiably wrong? Do you admit the error and change course? Or do you double down and keep repeating the same nonsense, hoping that maybe in another half-century you might be proven right?
Which brings us to those of paragons of Puritan fiscal morality, the deficit fighters.
They have been repeating the same arguments, again and again, my entire adult life. They make dire scary warnings about government deficits, and yet none of the things they warn about ever come true.
Other Charts:
The Employment Situation is Worse than the Unemployment Rate Indicates
MMT Fare:
Bill Mitchell: As the mainstream paradigm breaks down
In other words, all this talk about the need for fiscal rules, and other constraints on government (treasury or central bank) are really not financial (“technical”) but, rather, issues of ideology.
If you think the “market economy” is the ultimate arbiter, then, of course, intervention into those processes will be seen as sub-optimal.
I do not hold the outcomes of an unfettered market economy as being the desirable benchmark upon which we assess government policy.
Quite the opposite in fact.
….
Add to that the relentless labour market deregulation and anti-union attacks in advanced countries, which have made “the wage-price spirals of the past (“second-round effects”) less likely”.
This is a point I have been making for ages – you need propagating mechanisms for inflation to become entrench after an initial shock.
At present, the global supply chains are in chaos.
I was told last week from a friend who uses large bulk freighters as part of his company’s business that the freight prices are rising steeply, in part, because there is huge congestion in China’s system of ports as a result of the Delta Covid strain causing long delays in port clearance.
And, the short-term price spikes are evident.
But to become entrenched as an accelerating inflation, the real income struggle between labour and capital has to be ignited.
That propagation will not be forthcoming any time soon.
Bubble Fare:
Narratives Matter, Until They Don’t: Introduction to the Intersubjective Markets Hypothesis
“Confronted by a reality of extreme complexity, we are obliged to resort to various methods of simplification: generalizations, dichotomies, metaphors, decision rules, and moral precepts.” – George Soros
Finance is teeming with beliefs about how the economy works and why asset prices fluctuate.
For years, we have been told that equities are going to the moon because of unconventional monetary policy. A quick glance on social networks, and more particularly on the comments section, shows us that a lot of people (from specialists to the average Joe) are firmly convinced that the expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance is the main cause of risky asset hyperinflation in the United States.
Unfortunately, that is not true, and everyone knows that correlation does not imply causation. In fact, if quantitative easing was a main driver of stocks performance, then the Nikkei would have outperformed any other index for years.
Besides, assets purchase programs by central banks do not necessarily lead to price appreciation, as evidenced by the “Mississippi bubble” in France. Indeed, when the shares of the Mississippi Company stared to collapse in 1721, the Banque de France governed by John Law decided to step in and to buy shares in order to stabilize the market. That kind of “equity QE” program is the ultimate dream of many people on Wall Street, and that it is exactly what the French central bank did at that time. However, people might be shocked to learn that prices continued to crash towards zero despite that intervention.
The reason is quite simple. If most people are convinced that an asset is worth nothing, then it does not really matter whether a big institution like a central bank is willing to buy it or not.
In other words, the current impact of QE on capital markets is mainly due to the perception people have of the link between monetary expansion and the market, even though that link is the product of collective beliefs. Therefore, we can have a liquidity crisis even with an ultra-dovish Fed.
Dealing With Simplistic Assumptions
Before going further, it is interesting to focus on the so-called relationship between interest rates and financial valuation, as one may argue that low rates structurally imply higher market prices. Every market professional has (or should have) heard about valuation models based on discounted cash flows or dividends. The underlying idea is quite straightforward: the current price of a bond or a stock is said to be the sum of the present value of future cash flows that the asset will generate.
But things are more complicated than that. Such a formula should be regarded as equation. And this equation literally means that if you invest a certain amount of money today at a constant compound annual growth rate, after a while you will get the same amount as if you had reinvested cash flows generated by your investment using the same interest rate. Said differently, this popular equation holds true IF AND ONLY IF two conditions are met. Firstly, you must anticipate the level of cash flows that the issuer will generate in the future. That should not be a problem for fixed income securities, but that is a different story for equities. Secondly, interest rates must remain constant over time, which is a very restrictive assumption.
Thus, the relationship between such models and market prices is not necessarily reliable. But remember that what matters on capital markets is the fact that investors do believe that low rates imply higher valuations, not the veracity of this statement. Every day, we hear that the housing market is getting more affordable because rates keep dropping, while every serious economist know that the affordability index has never been so low in many developed countries.
The Intersubjective Markets Hypothesis
Thus, the question of narratives is essential to understand how people interact on financial markets and how collective trades are formed. Beyond economics, research in anthropology has shown that intersubjectivity is the pillar of our societies, differentiating humans from any other animal species. Without intersubjective ideas, it would be impossible for us to form groups larger than 150 individuals. There will be no religion, no states, no laws, but also no economic activity, no money, no capitalism, no company, and a fortiori no stock exchange. Those ideas were well synthetized by Yuval Noah Harari in 2016 in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind [1].
In a paper published recently by the Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics (see the full version here) [2], I detailed how the intersubjectivity concept applies to finance, putting forward the concept of “market narratives.” Indeed, markets are all about intersubjective concepts, such as “bulls” or “bears.” More interestingly, how participants interpret the news and how it affects market movements is very important because those narratives may influence further investors and thus impact future prices. From a scientific perspective, narratives can be regarded as the subtle result of a storytelling that spreads among the population of investors like “a meme machine.”
Markets and Darwinian Evolution
Before going further, it is worth talking about the “adaptive markets hypothesis” proposed by MIT professor Andrew Lo in 2004 [3]. According to Lo, principles of species evolution should be applied to financial interactions: competition, selection, and above all adaptation.
Participants of a marketplace face a changing and selective environment, meaning that they are forced to adapt to the new conditions. Their environment evolves because of structural changes affecting the economy, politics or technology.
Nevertheless, I argue that narratives are the main source of instability of capital markets. Said differently, investors do not necessarily try to adapt to changes in the economic fundamentals, but rather to changes in the dominant narratives.
Although there are some links between the two, a narrative may differ significantly from economic fundamentals (in case of any doubt think about the “buy the dip” narrative). This explains why financial variables are unbounded and can reach extreme levels whatever happens in the economy, as evidenced by the unexpected bullish impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on most risky assets.
Chaos and Avalanches
While chasing a narrative seems to be the natural response of investors motivated by survival, it is important to bear in mind that this intersubjective framework should be thought in terms of “punctuated equilibrium,” meaning that markets spontaneously self-organize around dominant narratives until the new metaphysical order collapse.
The name for that is self-organized criticality, a concept that was introduced by Danish physicist Per Bak in the 1990s [4]. As already mentioned in previous posts on this blog, self-organized criticality is common to various systems such as seismic activity, solar activity, epidemics, species evolution and of course financial markets. The underlying idea is the fact that those systems self-organize towards critical points that work as attractors, before being suddenly disorganized because of catastrophic events also known as “avalanches.” On capital markets, volatility spikes might be the real markers of avalanches, meaning that they are similar to earthquakes, floods, or species mass extinction.
The Trend Is Your Schizophrenic Friend
All that being said, the intersubjective markets hypothesis has two main implications for investors.
The first one is that the only way to outperform indices in every bull market is to be able to quickly adapt to the new narratives. Of course, that does not mean that investing with discipline like Warren Buffet is a bad idea. Developing a process based on rigorous fundamental analysis always pays off in the long run, but there is no guarantee that such a strategy will beat benchmarks under all circumstances, as evidenced by the serious underperformance of value funds since 2012. Thus, from a business perspective, being adaptive can be a necessary condition to survive on a highly competitive environment.
The second implication is that an adaptive process will not always be sufficient as one day or another the dominant narrative is likely to be seriously challenged, leading to high volatility conditions and fait-tail events. The problem is that it is difficult to anticipate those transitions phases, while their impact on the system can be significant.
Interesting work has been achieved by econophysicists led by French professor Didier Sornette [5] since the 1990s in fields like bubble detection (e.g. the log-periodicity power law singularity model). However, anticipating the end of a bull run is still difficult despite encouraging results (see It is All About Fractals – Tech Stocks and The LPPLS Model).
Today, people keep saying that you should just “ride the bubble.” The only problem with this claim is the fact you are likely to be trapped when it comes time to close your positions (i.e. when the dominant narrative is no longer valid).
My feeling is that you should only try to climb K2 if you know how to deal with altitude sickness and with the descent. Otherwise, you are just a candidate for the next big disaster.
Regulators: “Where Is My Mind?”
The last implication of the intersubjective markets hypothesis is the role played by regulators. We have seen for the past two decades that narratives can lead to extreme distortions in the economy. In theory, financial authorities like the SEC or the Federal Reserve should be careful that such things do not happen, as speculative bubbles are a threat to the economy and to social stability.
Against all odds, major central banks like the Fed or the ECB have decided to do the exact opposite, as they have been feeding dangerous narratives for years, doing whatever it takes in terms of propaganda to make sure that investors convince themselves that prices will never fall again (see Perseverance: Looking for Signs of Free Market Activity on Earth).
Time will tell if this was a good idea. But history already seems to prove the contrary.
Booms and Bezzles.
Liberal left economist JK Galbraith back in the 1950s, when referring to the ‘roaring twenties’ , called the results of speculation, ‘bezzle’. Coming from the word ‘embezzlement’ Galbraith defined ‘bezzle’; as “a temporary gap between the perceived value of a portfolio of assets and its long-term economic value. “
Michael Pettis, the China-based Keynesian economist and co-author of the prize-winning book, Trade Wars and Class wars, latched onto Galbraith’s term to describe the current COVID pandemic financial boom. Pettis links Galbraith’s definition of bezzle in these speculative financial booms to the work of Hyman Minsky, the semi-socialist post-Keynesian economist of the 1980s, who argued that financial markets can create (temporary) impressions of false wealth very similar to those of Ponzi schemes (where one investor is paid back with the money from a new investor).
Minsky explained, “over periods of prolonged prosperity, the economy transits from financial relations that make for a stable system to financial relations that make for an unstable system.” Pettis adds: “because the bezzle is, by definition, temporary (though it may last for a few years or even a decade or two), at some point the bezzle will be eliminated, and its elimination will reverse the earlier boost to the economy. When that happens, what appeared to be a virtuous cycle becomes a vicious cycle.”
COVID-19 notes:
US now has more than four times as many cases of COVID and twice as many in hospital as this time last year with deaths up 80% - despite 62% of population with one shot amid Delta surge: Mu is now in LA
A new study of dorm rooms shows how ventilation curbs virus levels.
Coronavirus Epidemics first hit more than 21,000 years ago
Experimental investigation of indoor aerosol dispersion and accumulation in the context of COVID-19: Effects of masks and ventilation
[T]he apparent exhalation filtration efficiency is significantly lower than the ideal filtration efficiency of the mask material. Nevertheless, high-efficiency masks, such as the KN95, still offer substantially higher apparent filtration efficiencies (60% and 46% for R95 and KN95 masks, respectively) than the more commonly used cloth (10%) and surgical masks (12%), and therefore are still the recommended choice in mitigating airborne disease transmission indoors. The results also suggest that, while higher ventilation capacities are required to fully mitigate aerosol build-up, even relatively low air-change rates (2h−1) lead to lower aerosol build-up compared to the best performing mask in an unventilated space.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Ghostly Satellite Image Captures the Arctic ‘Losing Its Soul’
Wildlife 'Red List' a grim tally of extinction threat
Know Your Enemy: Living at the End of Our World, with Daniel Sherrell and Dorothy Fortenberry
What does it feel like to imagine the future as climate catastrophe looms?
Fun Fare:
Particularly love the accent-switching from 2:00 to 2:30
The Juice Media: Honest Government Ad | Carbon Capture and Storage
The Australien Government has made an ad about Carbon Capture and Storage, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative.
Other Fare:
WANT TO FIND PLANET NINE? HERE'S A TREASURE MAP.
Pics of the Week:
Finalists: 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards
Wildlife photographer of the year
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Election Fare:
You Can’t Trust Justin Trudeau’s Election Promises
Regular Fare:
The Gaslighting New York Times
At the same time that the Biden Administration and the slim congressional majority are studiously doing nothing to keep millions of people from being kicked off their unemployment benefits, kicked out of their homes, protected from predatory Covid hospital billing even as the Delta variant has created a surge in cases and deaths, the New York Times cynically assures us in a front page headline that "From Cradle to Grave, Democrats Move to Expand the Social Safety Net."
They seemingly forgot to insert the word "holes" after "safety net." …
Albert Bates: The Great Pause Week 77: The Manchurian Confusion
Two decades into their 81st Century, the powers that be in China announced a succession of dramatic policy shifts. They began with a move on the transnationalist Chinese financial sector, including Hong Kong; disrupting ownership of the largest online retail chains; sidelining their wealthy oligarchs; keeping enterprises from leaving China through public stock offerings in New York, London or Brussels; banning BitCoin miners; and reasserting authority over the all-important data that technology companies — FinTech, MedTech, EdTech, gaming, telecommunications, even China’s version of Uber, Didi Chuxing — had begun amassing to track personal buying habits, health, gaming skills, attitudes, and interests. The Chinese central party asserted dominion over all that. If you were a company in China, Xi Jinping seemed to say, the government is now your managing business partner. The data you gather belong to us. The profits you make return to be used to elevate the standard of living for Chinese people. We are, after all, communists.
… The reveal came when China moved to control the price of infant formula. The hidden motive behind China’s crackdown was much simpler then the Sinowatch cabals on K-Street fantasized. It was about babies.
…
In recent years this population conversation has divided into two opposing camps. One camp sees the issue in terms of economics. There is a “demographic time bomb” about to explode in the most highly developed and modernized countries. It has already begun to shrink those countries native populations below replacement level and erode their abilities to maintain economic growth, innovation, and the essential services required for a high standard of living.
The other camp sees the issue in terms of ecology. Human population has grown beyond reasonable limits and is now degrading biodiversity, social systems, and nature, leading to a spiral of abrupt climate change, extinctions, pandemic diseases, and economic overshoot. Our demands on the planet for energy, mineral and food supplies exceed its ability to support us at this scale.
Climate Crisis Fare:
WASF: Arctic has enough reserves to supply Russia for centuries – Russian official
A Prayer for Nonbelievers
re: The Limits to Growth: It was not, as the corporate media insisted it was, a prophecy of doom. That’s one of the details that got swept under the rug by the mainstream back in the 1970s and still gets swept under the rug by the project’s critics today. The point of The Limits to Growth was that we as a species, and as a community of nations, had a choice. We could rein back on economic growth ourselves and embrace the promise of a steady state future in relative balance with the global biosphere, or we could ignore the limits to growth until we slammed into them, and topple over into a long ragged decline ending in a new dark age.
That was the choice. It’s crashingly unpopular these days to suggest that we could have chosen the former option, but that’s just sour grapes talking: we didn’t make that choice while we could, and so it’s emotionally easier for a lot of people to insist that it was never an option at all.
By 2050, if the World3 standard run turns out to be correct, resource availability will have bottomed out at close to sustainable levels, all four of the other variables will have turned down hard, industrial output in particular will be at a modest fraction of current levels, and we will be living in a different world.
Now of course the first thing that comes to a great many minds when any such scenario gets discussed is flat denial, and I expect to see a lot of that. The second thing is the plaintive insistence that there must be some way to avoid having to go through the future thus sketched out. There was a way to do that, but the past tense—“was”—is essential here. If people had listened and taken action fifty years ago when the warning was first given, we’d have had plenty of time to make a smooth transition to a sustainable steady-state economy, back when our resource demands were much lower than they are now and the planet’s capacity to manage pollution wasn’t anything like so overburdened.
We didn’t do that, and now it’s too late. It really is as simple as that….
We leaked the upcoming IPCC report!
We have leaked part III of the upcoming IPCC report. There’s no time to wait around, there’s no time for continued inaction–the people deserve to know NOW what our corporate owned politicians have done to them.
The greatest crime ever has already been carried out–the perpetrators are still at liberty, but the victims are starting to pile up.
We leaked the report because governments–pressured and bribed by fossil fuel and other industries, protecting their failed ideology and avoiding accountability–have edited the conclusions before official reports were released in the past. We leaked it to show that scientists are willing to disobey and take personal risk to inform the public.
The report explicitly states that incremental change is not a viable option. It states that individual behavioural changes alone are insignificant. It states that justice, equity and redistribution are essential to climate policy.
It says that we need massive investment–to transform energy systems, transport, industry, land use and agriculture, housing, and to prepare for the accelerating effects of climate breakdown–not the death cult of conservative economics.
It shows that we must abandon economic growth, which is the basis of capitalism.
For thousands of scientists–mostly older, privileged, moderate–to agree on something so apparently radical demonstrates the severity of the present moment. But the real radicals are in power. They will plunder the Earth until it is but fire and ash, unless we stop them.
We plead with people to go into serious nonviolent resistance. To join us in the streets to apply unbearable pressure on this genocidal system–to take it down before it takes us all down with it.
The leaked documents can be found HERE.
Climate Quotes of the Week:
Robinson’s reading of human nature, collectively, is that change doesn’t happen until reality unmistakably demands it. I’ve felt this way for a long time now. In fact my whole writing life of impassioned environmentalism seems to make it clear that fine words and eloquent appeals do little to move the needle. No: change happens when everyone can see it in the flesh and feel it as fear, loss, danger. Ministry’s plot bears this out: when death comes, then delusions and habitual denials are finally discarded. Only then.
Peter Carter: IPCC AR6 WG1 Total heating of the biosphere (radiative forcing) has never been higher, with a big increase from 2000, mainly due to fossil fuel combustion- which governments are still pushing and plan to keep pushing. That is a global death sentence.
Now of course the first thing that comes to a great many minds when any such scenario gets discussed is flat denial, and I expect to see a lot of that. The second thing is the plaintive insistence that there must be some way to avoid having to go through the future thus sketched out. There was a way to do that, but the past tense—“was”—is essential here. If people had listened and taken action fifty years ago when the warning was first given, we’d have had plenty of time to make a smooth transition to a sustainable steady-state economy, back when our resource demands were much lower than they are now and the planet’s capacity to manage pollution wasn’t anything like so overburdened.
We didn’t do that, and now it’s too late. It really is as simple as that….
We leaked the upcoming IPCC report!
We have leaked part III of the upcoming IPCC report. There’s no time to wait around, there’s no time for continued inaction–the people deserve to know NOW what our corporate owned politicians have done to them.
The greatest crime ever has already been carried out–the perpetrators are still at liberty, but the victims are starting to pile up.
We leaked the report because governments–pressured and bribed by fossil fuel and other industries, protecting their failed ideology and avoiding accountability–have edited the conclusions before official reports were released in the past. We leaked it to show that scientists are willing to disobey and take personal risk to inform the public.
The report explicitly states that incremental change is not a viable option. It states that individual behavioural changes alone are insignificant. It states that justice, equity and redistribution are essential to climate policy.
It says that we need massive investment–to transform energy systems, transport, industry, land use and agriculture, housing, and to prepare for the accelerating effects of climate breakdown–not the death cult of conservative economics.
It shows that we must abandon economic growth, which is the basis of capitalism.
For thousands of scientists–mostly older, privileged, moderate–to agree on something so apparently radical demonstrates the severity of the present moment. But the real radicals are in power. They will plunder the Earth until it is but fire and ash, unless we stop them.
We plead with people to go into serious nonviolent resistance. To join us in the streets to apply unbearable pressure on this genocidal system–to take it down before it takes us all down with it.
The leaked documents can be found HERE.
Climate Quotes of the Week:
Robinson’s reading of human nature, collectively, is that change doesn’t happen until reality unmistakably demands it. I’ve felt this way for a long time now. In fact my whole writing life of impassioned environmentalism seems to make it clear that fine words and eloquent appeals do little to move the needle. No: change happens when everyone can see it in the flesh and feel it as fear, loss, danger. Ministry’s plot bears this out: when death comes, then delusions and habitual denials are finally discarded. Only then.
Peter Carter: IPCC AR6 WG1 Total heating of the biosphere (radiative forcing) has never been higher, with a big increase from 2000, mainly due to fossil fuel combustion- which governments are still pushing and plan to keep pushing. That is a global death sentence.
COVID Fare:
Jonathan Cook: On child vaccines, the experts are suddenly reluctant to follow ‘the science’
In some of these blogs I have been trying to gently highlight what should be a very obvious fact: that “the science” we are being constantly told to follow is not quite as scientific as is being claimed.
That is inevitable in the context of a new virus about which much is still not known. And it is all the more so given that our main response to the pandemic – vaccination – while being a relatively effective tool against the worst disease outcomes is nonetheless an exceedingly blunt one. Vaccines are the epitome of the one-size-fits-all approach of modern medicine.
Into the void between our scientific knowledge and our fear of mortality has rushed politics. It is a refusal to admit that “the science” is necessarily compromised by political and commercial considerations that has led to an increasingly polarised – and unreasonable – confrontation between what have become two sides of the Covid divide. Doubt and curiosity have been squeezed out by the bogus certainties of each faction.
….
To want more open debate, not less, about where we head next, especially as western states have vaccinated significant majorities of their populations, is often being treated as the equivalent of “Covid denial”.
Where this new authoritarian climate leads is apparent in the shaming of anyone who tries to highlight that our responses to Covid are following a familiar big-business-friendly pattern: focus all attention on expensive, short-term, resource-hungry quick fixes (in this case, vaccines) and ignore important, long-term, sustainable solutions such as improving the population’s health and immunity to this pandemic and the ones likely to follow.
My Experience with Covid-19
Covid was much worse than I expected for someone of my age and fitness level. That statement may surprise some people who have known me in the past, but I spent a significant part of my late 20’s and 30’s fixing bad habits and building a base of fitness. I have a BMI of 23.7, exercise strenuously with both resistance and aerobic activities, and take a fistful of supplements every day (zinc, Vitamin D, you name it) and I increased my supplements during infection. I even took ivermectin (human pills, not horse paste) towards the middle of my infection when it got worse. None of that helped my mild case actually feel mild. Someone close to me asked if I felt foolish for not vaccinating before this. I said I don’t think so because I was one of the first people I knew who was infected during the Delta wave. My original analysis based on the original Covid data indicated the vaccine was a toss-up for me; I have consistently recommended vaccination for people over 60 or with comorbidities. Something big has changed with the Delta variant (see details below). Unlike in previous waves, there are many more middle-aged people adjacent to my social circles dying and many more young people needing hospitalization
‘Get Sicker’: Anatomy Of A Failed Policy
Throughout COVID, the media has stepped into line like good soldiers in a war on disease, failing, in the process, to do its job. It gave government a pass on the dearth of outpatient care. It fostered the fiction that aggressively treating COVID is a right-wing construct. It dismissed vaccine side effects as rare. It enabled vast censorship. News outlets might be excused for initially minimizing falling vaccine efficacy in this dynamic situation. But it cannot be excused for its politicization of and disdain for generic early treatments. As a mainstream community journalist for decades, with two books and many awards, I am appalled at what this profession has become.
Existing drugs could have relegated COVID to a manageable outpatient disease by the first half of 2021. We have promising generics: ivermectin primarily but also fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine, budesonide and protocols that employ them with zinc, Vitamin D and the like. They have been suppressed around the globe, as countries – mainly, but not all, in the first world — have caved under pressure to conform to the U.S.-hatched strategy.
OTC COVID Rxs, Azelastin to Zinc
The Automatic Earth’s resident doctor, John Day MD, who’s about to lose his job for refusing to be vaccinated, has compiled a list of OTC prophylactics and treatments for Covid, and specified dosages.
Steve Kirsch: Open Letter to CDC
I am the founder of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund (www.treatearly.org). Our work in funding early treatments for COVID was featured on 60 Minutes. I have been vaccinated and my entire family has been vaccinated. However, shortly after I was fully vaccinated, I began to hear stories from my friends that were very troubling. For example, one friend had three relatives who were formerly healthy die after getting the vaccine. Another friend had a heart attack 2 minutes after the injection and is now disabled, apparently for life. I assembled a team of over 19 doctors and scientists listed at the end of this comment to investigate the available evidence. Using the VAERS database and other official government data sources from the US and around the world (covering 35% of the world’s population), we found evidence that clearly demonstrates that the current vaccines are significantly more dangerous than has been previously believed.
Our most important findings include:
1/ The “real world” fatality data from VAERS does not match the fatality data from the Phase 3 trials. They aren’t even close. Using multiple independent methods, we estimate that over 150,000 Americans have already been killed. It is urgent to resolve this discrepancy as soon as possible as we strongly believe that the real world data is right and the vaccines should be immediately stopped.
2/ None of the COVID vaccines reduce all-cause morbidity. It’s the opposite: they all significantly increase all-cause morbidity by as much as 4.2 times baseline (p<=0.00001). The CDC must know this since this information is hiding in plain sight in the published literature. What is the point of offering an optional medical intervention which significantly increases all-cause morbidity when safer alternatives such as early treatment are available?
3/ There is an error in the adverse event detection formula used by the CDC that appears to have prevented the CDC from seeing the safety signals that were obvious to our VAERS experts.
4/ Early treatment and prophylaxis protocols are a superior option to the current vaccines, yet have been inexplicably ignored by the NIH:
• Higher relative risk reduction (over 99%)
• Greater safety (minor temporary side effects, known safety profile)
– They lower both all-cause mortality and all-cause morbidity
– They work equally well on all variants
– They do not promote escape variants
– They do not cause vaccine enhanced infectivity/replication
– They do not cause prion diseases
– They prevent long-haul COVID syndrome nearly 100% of the time
– They enable people to acquire recovered immunity which is both 13 times stronger and more durable than vaccine-induced immunity …
Denninger: From JAMA: Proof They’re AT BEST Worthless
Non-sterilizing vaccines do not suppress anything; if you can still get and spread the virus, and we now know that is true despite the claims of the lying media, the CDC, NIH, Fauci and everyone else originally back to December and January when those false claims were used to CON people into taking jabs then until and unless you actually acquire an infection and build natural protection spread does not stop because you are not part of the herd that suppresses spread.
The JAMA study now proves that
The jabs are worthless to inhibit the spread of Covid-19. The legal, ethical and moral arguments for “forced vaccination” are now dust. The anecdotal evidence from places like Cornell, which is taking a case rate five times that of last year despite near 100% vaccination rates, are now converted into hard, irrefutable science. The debate on “passports”, “digital certificates” and demands by employers and others to get jabbed is over. JAMA has proved that the jabs do exactly nothing to prevent the spread of disease.
Kirsch: COVID Vaccines Have Killed Over 200,000 Americans (PDF: 48 pages)
Denninger: There’s An Off Ramp – But It Has A Price
This means there is no safe way to vaccinate against this disease because introducing the spike into your body, no matter how you do it, inherently runs the risk of serious clotting-based disorders. You might or might not get nailed but there is no avoiding the risk. That same risk is what kills you, most of the time, if you actually get Covid-19 and die but the premise that you avoid that risk when taking a jab is a lie. You cannot; the risk is inherent in introducing the spike into your circulation and there is no way around that with an IM injection because the muscles of the body are very well-perfused (that is, there's a lot of blood flow in them) even if the person who performs the injection does not hit a blood vessel, and they might.
These facts are not up for debate on a scientific basis any longer. They also fully explain the myocarditis, pericarditis and myriad other so-called "rare" events that occur with these jabs such as strokes, heart attacks and other clotting-based disorders. In addition the data is that the 2nd shot in the 2-shot series is much more dangerous than the first, which implies an exponential expansion of risk.
Whether that expansion of risk bleeds back off over a couple of months or so is entirely unknown as it has not been studied. Without a data set of hundreds of thousands (so as to get statistical significance) and both baseline and follow-up d-Dimer testing, at minimum, we will never be able to put numbers on this, nor get a decay rate on the risk if it decays, and nobody is doing those studies.
That's the bad news; if you take repeated shots and the risk does not bleed off then eventually you will kill yourself. If, for example, the risk on the first shot is 1/100,000 (extremely rare), on the second 1/10,000 (that's a bad pattern) and the risk does not bleed off over the space of three or four months then the risk from the third is 1/1,000 (that's 0.1% and quite nasty) while the risk from a fourth jab rises to 1% at which point you're in the ballpark for a severely morbid person when it comes to Covid-19 infection itself killing them. The fifth jab would put the risk of getting screwed at ten percent, which is approximately the rate of death from the original SARS and the sixth would be odds-on as literal suicide.
How many jabs did you say you're willing to risk taking again? You cannot get your health back if you ruin it by being stupid. The younger you are the worse the risk is in terms of years of enjoyable life lost. To take that sort of risk when you're 85, fat, diabetic, you have an almost-10% risk of death in the next year from all causes and the Coof is 10% likely to kill you is very different than to take that same risk to your health when you're 17, male, have a BMI under 25, there's not a damn thing wrong with you medically, your all-cause risk of death (most of it by violence) is 7/10,000 and your risk, by the CDC's numbers, of Covid-19 killing you if infected is approximately 1/100,000.
From Ilargi: “All too short part of a fascinating article in France Soir that shows, among other things, why spike proteins from vaccines do more damage than those in the virus. Telomeres.”
SARS-COV2, Vaccines Accelerate Biological Age
Are the spike proteins from RNA vaccines more harmful than the spike protein from the SARS-CoV2 virus? The following three experimental and then theoretical explanations allow us to answer in the affirmative. The “apprentice living technologists” thought to make the RNA of vaccines more stable by doping it with G bases, without modifying the corresponding amino acids, something made possible thanks to the “mode of operation” of the universal genetic code which allows several triplets to be produced. separate codons to encode one and the same amino acid. Unfortunately, in the context of vaccine RNAs, this leads to a diametrically opposed result since the latter become more unstable, more fragile and more brittle.
1 – The article “vaccine-induced Covid-19 mimicry” syndrome (Marschalek et al., 2021) shows how this doping in G bases of the spike RNA can cause changes in the reading frame of codons, therefore partial sequences of different amino acids, which may ultimately lead to thromboembolic events in patients immunized with covid-19 vaccines.
2 – In addition, it has been demonstrated how this excess of bases G of the RNA of the spike of the vaccines reduces to zero the megastructures according to AU / CG proportions defined by Fibonacci whereas, on the contrary, the spike of the virus and especially that variants see the complexity and quantity of such structures enriched. To put it simply, this means that the RNA of the vaccines is only a stack of nucleotides without the slightest backbone ensuring it a megastructure at medium and long distance, while the variants acquire day by day a greater solidity and cohesion. overall of their RNA. ( Perez JC 2021 )
3 – This inconsistency can also be visualized in the figure below as a kind of “fractal roughness” which is much more unstable and inharmonious in the RNA of the vaccine spike (Pfizer more particularly) than in the RNA of the spike of the vaccine. virus . This has been shown using the master code method.
[..] To date, the health response to the management of the crisis consists of the injection of substances still being tested, still in phase 3 at the time of this article’s publication, for which the definition of the word “vaccine” had to be modified by the WHO itself. In addition, it is accepted that injection with messenger RNA technology results in increased production of the spike protein while not reducing transmission (Pfizer treatment reported only 42% effective against the delta variant). This vaccine barrier would also promote the creation of variants that seek to bypass it. In countries which have massively vaccinated, the data published by the authorities tend to show that a high percentage of people hospitalized are people whose vaccination course is complete.
[..] Several questions arise about the virus: 1 – Is it better to catch the disease randomly and develop a natural global immune response or to try the vaccine experience by incurring the many side effects reported by pharmacovigilance, as well as a risk of increased cell senescence? 2 – Is the deterioration in biological age the same in Covid patients and in vaccinated people? Is one worse than the other? At this stage, no one can give a precise answer to these questions. In any case, this virus causes an increase in the biological age in people who contract the disease, the effect of which is probably accentuated by the vaccine injection. With the decrease in efficacy on contamination, it is therefore essential to prevent the worsening of the disease and for this, early management is imperative.
Ivermectin: a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honoured distinction with indicated efficacy against a new global scourge, COVID-19
In 2015, the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in its only award for treatments of infectious diseases since six decades prior, honoured the discovery of ivermectin (IVM), a multifaceted drug deployed against some of the world’s most devastating tropical diseases. Since March 2020, when IVM was first used against a new global scourge, COVID-19, more than 20 randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have tracked such inpatient and outpatient treatments. Six of seven meta-analyses of IVM treatment RCTs reporting in 2021 found notable reductions in COVID-19 fatalities, with a mean 31% relative risk of mortality vs. controls. During mass IVM treatments in Peru, excess deaths fell by a mean of 74% over 30 days in its ten states with the most extensive treatments. Reductions in deaths correlated with the extent of IVM distributions in all 25 states with p < 0.002. Sharp reductions in morbidity using IVM were also observed in two animal models, of SARS-CoV-2 and a related betacoronavirus. The indicated biological mechanism of IVM, competitive binding with SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, is likely non-epitope specific, possibly yielding full efficacy against emerging viral mutant strains.
As US Prepares to Ban Ivermectin for Covid-19, More Countries in Asia Begin Using It
The campaign against ivermectin is intensifying in the US. Until recently the health authorities appeared to be quite content merely to ridicule those who take or prescribe the drug in order to treat or prevent Covid-19. A couple of weeks ago, the FDA released a now-infamous advertorial on twitter with the heading “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” The subheading: “Using the drug Ivermectin to treat Covid-19 can be dangerous and even lethal. The FDA has not approved the drug for that purpose.”
It’s a subtle message that has been faithfully echoed by the corporate media: ivermectin, a tried-and-tested drug that has won its discoverers a Nobel Prize for the impact it has had on human health over the last 35 years, should only be given to animals. But now the information war is taking a darker turn, as the media transitions from misinformation and obfuscation to outright lies and fabrication.
…
When financial returns are the primary priority in a health care system, this is what you get. Everything is geared to churning out brand new, barely tested experimental medicines as quickly as possible, with scant communication of what potential side effects they may produce. Throw in monopoly control of intellectual property and you have the perfect business model. Whether the new medicines work or not or do more harm than good, they will cost an arm and a leg. And their manufacturers will probably be protected from liability. The patients’ health, well being and welfare are barely an afterthought.
One of These Things is Not Like the Others: A Precautionary Tale
… If you said that genetic vaccines are different from commercial drone technology, small nuclear fission reactors, and self-driving cars, then CONGRATULATIONS! The difference is that instead of testing genetic vaccines in progressive stages over many years before putting them into widespread use, accepting frustrating if necessary redesigns after accumulating long term safety data, we instead applied psychological and economic pressure to much of the world to use them immediately.
What is the Precautionary Principle?
If you did not successfully solve this puzzle, it’s likely that you haven’t learned about or absorbed the purpose of the Precautionary Principle. The Precautionary Principle, which is codified into both national laws and internationally recognized medical norms, recognizes the need to conclusively demonstrate [net] benefits [with respect to harms] for medical interventions before using them on a large scale such as a few hundred thousand or a few billion people.
Mathew Crawford: R, the Reproduction Number, and Exponential Fear
From the outset of the pandemic, metrics that represent (sort of) the first derivative of infection waves/curves, have been promoted (by media, politicians, and acolytes of “The Science” more than from real scientists or good faith health experts) seemingly in the best ways to induce anxiety and fear. You may have seen R, R_0 (“R naught”), R_t (“R at time t”), or even R_Z (“localized R”) along with the extra-sciency-sounding enunciations of the subscripts being used by well-practiced public speakers carrying the message,
THIS IS ALL SO BAD THAT WE NEED TO TAKE AWAY YOUR JOBS, YOUR RIGHTS, AND YOUR DIGNITY TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN!
That bad?!
Yeah, so bad that we have to submit to massive experimental interventions too quickly to think about the associated risks (here and here), alternatives, or how harmful this virus would even be in the context of sane public health leadership. So, it’s alright to slow down for the public and maybe also the scientists to understand all this so that informed consent can actually take place, right?
…
Rrrrrr, You Ready for the Punchline, Mateys?
Geographies where R_0 was the highest fared far better during the pandemic than those where R_0 was moderately low. I will explain why in an upcoming article that will (once again and for the 83rd time) roundly obliterate the absurdities of the measures taken by most of the world’s public health power players. Stay tuned, and remember to send this article out to a few friends who might still need to read this and understand how to begin to dial back their anxiety levels. Your help in restoring sanity is always appreciated.
CO-VID of the Week:
Video: Prominent Pathologist: What These Jabs Do to the Brain and Other Organs
COVID Quotes of the Week:
German companies cannot ask about employees’ Covid vaccination status – labor minister
“We must act according to the rule of law. Acting under the rule of law means that an employer is not entitled to information about health data…[and] is also not allowed to look at the medical records of an employee, because this is very personal data,”
Gal G: This just keeps getting better and better. Remember when I said that this is a misuse of the term “vaccine”?
What would happen if local media headlines would, besides “20 Covid deaths today”, also say “10 Covid vaccine deaths today”. Not even thinkable in the present landscape, but crucial for informed consent. 100s of 1000s across the world have died from the vaccines by now, and many millions have had severe adverse reactions, but none of these things are reported. There are “systems” like VAERS in the US and EudraVigilance in the EU that pretend to keep track of adverse reactions, but they themselves say they catch maybe 1-10% of those. And even they are already at some 40,000 deaths. But as long as the media don’t report on it…
My self-appointed role within the COVID19 mayhem, was to search for the truth – as far as it could be found – and to attempt to provide useful information for those who wish to read my blog. The main reason for prolonged silence, and introspection, is that I am not sure I can find the truth. I do not know if it can be found anymore. Today I am unsure what represents a fact, and what has simply been made up. A sad and scary state of affairs. This is not just true of the mainstream and the mainstream media, which has simply decided to parrot all Government and WHO statements without any critical engagement…or thought.
Eric Weinstein: You overestimate me. Look, I’m for temporary health measures. But right now, this ‘temporary’ situation is about 10% of my kids’ lives. One has been in college for 2 years. This is no longer two weeks to flatten the curve. It’s a GIANT gash in a child’s formative years by now.
By now I want answers. Things that make sense. I don’t want to hear anymore nonsense from The Lancet, from Dr Fauci, from @TwitterSafety, from @CDCgov, etc. What is this? What do we know about its origin that we aren’t saying? Is this permanent? Is there a real plan? Why the BS?
Max Blumenthal: 1.5 yrs ago if you warned that passports proving compliance w/ mandated medical interventions would be required to participate in society, you’d be called a conspiracist. Now that the conspiracy’s real, msm hacks resort to logical fallacy to normalize what was once unthinkable.
From David Windt: "Until we end the Regulatory Capture of the @US_FDA and its Big Brother, @CDCgov, we can continue to expect more of the same: expensive, dangerous, and marginally effective drug approvals. And a smokescreen on anything cheap that actually works."
From Dave Collum: Here is the Bible—the Rosetta Stone—of Ivermectin. An incredibly thorough review from Japanese scientists looking from all imaginable angles. Parts will seem dense to some, but it's a moving read.
Kulvinder Kaur MD: It’s far easier to continue believing lies than accept that you’ve been lied to & are still being lied to. Irrational fear & cognitive dissonance are powerful forces. But courage & love conquer all. Step back, pause, open your heart & mind: think critically. Humanity will prevail
Kulvinder Kaur MD: New Covid Pre-print: Drs Ioannidis & Axfors at Stanford
Age Infection Survival Rate
0-19 99.9973%
20-29 99.986%
30-39 99.969%
40-49 99.918%
50-59 99.73%
60-69 99.41%
70+ 97.6% (non-inst.)
70+ 94.5% (all)
COVID Tweet Threads of the Week:
We’ve got to talk about the Rolling Stone invermectin article. Turns out the story about rural hospitals so flooded with ODs that they couldn’t treat other patients was made up, entirely invented. A lot of people took the bait, and I’ve got the screenshots.
First, for context, here’s the original piece from @RollingStone and the follow up from the actual hospital saying the story was BS and that the one (one!) person the story quotes doesn’t work at that hospital anymore (and hasn’t in months).
But it wasn’t just a single story out in the ether. Plenty of other places picked up the story, too, with no additional sourcing or research. Here’s @BusinessInsider parroting the scoop that wasn’t true to begin with.…..
Kory: Now lets talk about the #$%! captured medical journals…. Delay defer deny. The high impact journals let you see the science Pharma wants you to see, not the science that is out there. Sad sad state.
COVID Pics of the Week:
The CDC downgraded the definition of "vaccine" from a product that produces immunity to a preparation that stimulates an immune response for protection.
then:
now:
What would happen if local media headlines would, besides “20 Covid deaths today”, also say “10 Covid vaccine deaths today”. Not even thinkable in the present landscape, but crucial for informed consent. 100s of 1000s across the world have died from the vaccines by now, and many millions have had severe adverse reactions, but none of these things are reported. There are “systems” like VAERS in the US and EudraVigilance in the EU that pretend to keep track of adverse reactions, but they themselves say they catch maybe 1-10% of those. And even they are already at some 40,000 deaths. But as long as the media don’t report on it…
My self-appointed role within the COVID19 mayhem, was to search for the truth – as far as it could be found – and to attempt to provide useful information for those who wish to read my blog. The main reason for prolonged silence, and introspection, is that I am not sure I can find the truth. I do not know if it can be found anymore. Today I am unsure what represents a fact, and what has simply been made up. A sad and scary state of affairs. This is not just true of the mainstream and the mainstream media, which has simply decided to parrot all Government and WHO statements without any critical engagement…or thought.
Eric Weinstein: You overestimate me. Look, I’m for temporary health measures. But right now, this ‘temporary’ situation is about 10% of my kids’ lives. One has been in college for 2 years. This is no longer two weeks to flatten the curve. It’s a GIANT gash in a child’s formative years by now.
By now I want answers. Things that make sense. I don’t want to hear anymore nonsense from The Lancet, from Dr Fauci, from @TwitterSafety, from @CDCgov, etc. What is this? What do we know about its origin that we aren’t saying? Is this permanent? Is there a real plan? Why the BS?
Max Blumenthal: 1.5 yrs ago if you warned that passports proving compliance w/ mandated medical interventions would be required to participate in society, you’d be called a conspiracist. Now that the conspiracy’s real, msm hacks resort to logical fallacy to normalize what was once unthinkable.
From David Windt: "Until we end the Regulatory Capture of the @US_FDA and its Big Brother, @CDCgov, we can continue to expect more of the same: expensive, dangerous, and marginally effective drug approvals. And a smokescreen on anything cheap that actually works."
From Dave Collum: Here is the Bible—the Rosetta Stone—of Ivermectin. An incredibly thorough review from Japanese scientists looking from all imaginable angles. Parts will seem dense to some, but it's a moving read.
Kulvinder Kaur MD: It’s far easier to continue believing lies than accept that you’ve been lied to & are still being lied to. Irrational fear & cognitive dissonance are powerful forces. But courage & love conquer all. Step back, pause, open your heart & mind: think critically. Humanity will prevail
Kulvinder Kaur MD: New Covid Pre-print: Drs Ioannidis & Axfors at Stanford
Age Infection Survival Rate
0-19 99.9973%
20-29 99.986%
30-39 99.969%
40-49 99.918%
50-59 99.73%
60-69 99.41%
70+ 97.6% (non-inst.)
70+ 94.5% (all)
COVID Tweet Threads of the Week:
We’ve got to talk about the Rolling Stone invermectin article. Turns out the story about rural hospitals so flooded with ODs that they couldn’t treat other patients was made up, entirely invented. A lot of people took the bait, and I’ve got the screenshots.
First, for context, here’s the original piece from @RollingStone and the follow up from the actual hospital saying the story was BS and that the one (one!) person the story quotes doesn’t work at that hospital anymore (and hasn’t in months).
But it wasn’t just a single story out in the ether. Plenty of other places picked up the story, too, with no additional sourcing or research. Here’s @BusinessInsider parroting the scoop that wasn’t true to begin with.…..
Kory: Now lets talk about the #$%! captured medical journals…. Delay defer deny. The high impact journals let you see the science Pharma wants you to see, not the science that is out there. Sad sad state.
COVID Pics of the Week:
Meditation and the Art of War
…
That Could Never Happen to Us
Can you imagine doctors telling people to stay home during a pandemic using no medicine at all until they get sicker despite hundreds of scientific studies pointing to an array of options of varying positive efficacy?
Can you imagine public perception of medicine turning violently partisan prior to any trials reaching conclusions?
Can you imagine trusting a World Health Organization (WHO) not run by a doctor, but by a Marxist revolutionary?
Can you imagine any scientist or doctor looking at the design of the WHO experimental treatment protocols and concluding that those trials concluded anything about the optimal use of medicine?
Can you imagine that the Surgisphere paper managed to fool all the world's public health experts?
Can you imagine the founder of one of the world's top medical research institutes not recognizing the conclusion of a paper stating the exact opposite result of the data?
Can you imagine a nonsense paper becoming one of the most influential during the entire pandemic without one single statistician or mathematician pointing out that it's nonsense?
Can you imagine a paper with so many wrong and seemingly made-up numbers jumping off the page getting published? And still not retracted?
Can you imagine all of this nonsense and all of that nonsense happening without the sophisticated mass programming of a large population?
Can you imagine thinking that during a busy pandemic that doctors have time to figure out how to use an antiquated and notorious clunky database to the point that data is not substantially underreported?
Can you imagine thinking that statistics that mute each other are more important than sheer magnitude of numbers when it comes to pharmacovigilance?
Can you imagine American medical authorities using the Nuremberg Code as toilet paper?
The problem is that either you either missed it (falsely projecting your agency and sanity onto others) or else were too outnumbered to even talk about it. Directed insanity is precisely the result of our education system. It's a feature, not a bug. And the worst part about it is that the only people allowed in on the game are the willing tools of the Kunlangeta.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
How to Win at Covid 19 Chess.
• The Opening or Fauci’s Gambit: Engineer a virus that is somewhat deadlier than the flu. Release it and obfuscate the origins. Report worldwide deaths 24/7 to get people scared.
• The Middlegame or The Orthodox System: Block available treatments and roll-out draconian and painful measures until a novel, somewhat safe and somewhat effective but ultimately leaky therapy can be created. This will ensure the virus spreads worldwide and mutates, prolonging the crisis indefinitely. Use the media and governments to convince everyone that the new therapy is their only hope of returning to ‘normal’. Vilify anyone who says otherwise as haters of humanity.
• The Endgame or Zugzwang: Once people are convinced that the new therapy is their only hope, tell them that for the safety of all they must have continuing proof that their therapy is up-to-date in the form of a global, digital record required for admittance to any place where there are other people including shops, churches, travel and entertainment venues. Give this ‘passport’ a star-studded yet guilt-driven and threatening ad campaign and link it to a sexy technology like block-chain to make it hip and popular.
• Checkmate or The Smothered Mate: Once the passport is in place you can expand its criteria to include anything you want and people who refuse will be unable to function in the modern world. You have achieved total control of much of the world population. Your ability to predict people’s response 13 moves in advance has paid off. Clear the board at will.
Kunstler: The Game in Review
… America’s hair is on fire. A chimeric lab virus apparently funded by our own government has been on-the-loose since January 2020. Supposedly, that is. It’s a little hard to tell because, especially in the early going, a lot of very old and unwell people died — as the very old and unwell do — and a Covid-19 tag was slapped on their death certificates, and that primed the hysteria pump that is still pumping away heroically. A Covid-19 virus may indeed be running through the population, but 98.8 percent do not die from it and, as Covid-19 came on, the usual seasonal flu apparently went on sabbatical. Go figure.
The ignited hysteria was reinforced by a PCR test routine that could produce Covid-19 “cases” on-demand, and still does — even though the government had to admit that the test was unreliable and ordered it discontinued (effective, wait for it, December 2021… really?). Meanwhile, the cases keep coming… as ascertained by what means exactly? PCR tests, still? Or what?
About twenty minutes after the virus came on the scene, a vaccine magically materialized in the pharma labs. And after a completely half-assed testing routine, it was commissioned with an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), which permitted a wholesale vax-up of the whole population, and provided legal immunity from lawsuits for the pharma companies involved. The public greeted it with a grateful awe usually reserved for religious visitations. Treatment protocols with existing drugs were bad-mouthed and then officially suppressed. They had to be — and still have to be — to maintain that EUA, because the vaxes are not approved by the FDA (despite a recent FDA psy-op to fake-out the public otherwise).
Meanwhile, adverse reactions to the vaxes are literally off-the-charts (the decades-long vaccine safety charts, that is) and those numbers have been likewise suppressed. There are also plenty of reasons to suppose the vaxes create stealth vascular damage to multiple organs that could lead to death over a few years’ time. The prudent have taken note. The prudent are now in for getting cancelled out of daily life for their prudence. Most of these people are onto the game that is being played on them. They must be punished. …
Brandon Smith: The Orwellian Vaccine Passport Agenda Relies On The Lie Of The "Social Contract"
Is it legally and morally acceptable to constrict the rights and economic access of people in order to force them to submit to an experimental “vaccine”, or any other medical procedure for that matter?
Furthermore, who gets to decide what medical procedures are acceptable to enforce? Who gets to be the all powerful and benevolent overseer of every human being’s health path. I ask this because I don’t think many people realize the future repercussions of allowing governments or corporations (the same thing these days) to dictate covid vaccinations. It doesn’t stop there; in fact, we have no idea where this stops once the Pandora’s box is opened.
C.J. Hopkins: The Covidian Cult (Part III)
I called the New Normals a “Covidian Cult,” not to gratuitously insult or mock them, but because that is what totalitarianism is … a cult writ large, on a societal scale. Anyone who has tried to get through to them can confirm the accuracy of that analogy. You can show them the facts until you’re blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. You think you are having a debate over facts, but you are not. You are threatening their new “reality.” You think you are struggling to get them to think rationally. You are not. What you are is a heretic
CWT #1: It Ends When You End It
The exodus from clown world begins with you
GeoPolitical Fare:
Welsh: Living In Reality: Afghanistan Issue
Both of these things: improved security AND no corruption should not be a surprise. If you are surprised, your mental model of the world was badly flawed. The US backed government was massively corrupt and the Taliban are competent true believers.
Orwellian Fare:
Eva Bartlett: The media's addiction to Covid-19 ‘fear porn’ is perpetuating an ever-worsening cycle of societal damage across the world
Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.
… Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. … generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.
… By now hundreds of vocal doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists, and other professionals actually worth listening to, whose data and experience counter the hype pumped out in media have very quickly disappeared from social media, or otherwise deemed quacks, and are thus largely silenced. This leaves the general public mainly getting their information via hyped-up media.
Can you imagine trusting a World Health Organization (WHO) not run by a doctor, but by a Marxist revolutionary?
Can you imagine any scientist or doctor looking at the design of the WHO experimental treatment protocols and concluding that those trials concluded anything about the optimal use of medicine?
Can you imagine that the Surgisphere paper managed to fool all the world's public health experts?
Can you imagine the founder of one of the world's top medical research institutes not recognizing the conclusion of a paper stating the exact opposite result of the data?
Can you imagine a nonsense paper becoming one of the most influential during the entire pandemic without one single statistician or mathematician pointing out that it's nonsense?
Can you imagine a paper with so many wrong and seemingly made-up numbers jumping off the page getting published? And still not retracted?
Can you imagine all of this nonsense and all of that nonsense happening without the sophisticated mass programming of a large population?
Can you imagine thinking that during a busy pandemic that doctors have time to figure out how to use an antiquated and notorious clunky database to the point that data is not substantially underreported?
Can you imagine thinking that statistics that mute each other are more important than sheer magnitude of numbers when it comes to pharmacovigilance?
Can you imagine American medical authorities using the Nuremberg Code as toilet paper?
The problem is that either you either missed it (falsely projecting your agency and sanity onto others) or else were too outnumbered to even talk about it. Directed insanity is precisely the result of our education system. It's a feature, not a bug. And the worst part about it is that the only people allowed in on the game are the willing tools of the Kunlangeta.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
How to Win at Covid 19 Chess.
• The Opening or Fauci’s Gambit: Engineer a virus that is somewhat deadlier than the flu. Release it and obfuscate the origins. Report worldwide deaths 24/7 to get people scared.
• The Middlegame or The Orthodox System: Block available treatments and roll-out draconian and painful measures until a novel, somewhat safe and somewhat effective but ultimately leaky therapy can be created. This will ensure the virus spreads worldwide and mutates, prolonging the crisis indefinitely. Use the media and governments to convince everyone that the new therapy is their only hope of returning to ‘normal’. Vilify anyone who says otherwise as haters of humanity.
• The Endgame or Zugzwang: Once people are convinced that the new therapy is their only hope, tell them that for the safety of all they must have continuing proof that their therapy is up-to-date in the form of a global, digital record required for admittance to any place where there are other people including shops, churches, travel and entertainment venues. Give this ‘passport’ a star-studded yet guilt-driven and threatening ad campaign and link it to a sexy technology like block-chain to make it hip and popular.
• Checkmate or The Smothered Mate: Once the passport is in place you can expand its criteria to include anything you want and people who refuse will be unable to function in the modern world. You have achieved total control of much of the world population. Your ability to predict people’s response 13 moves in advance has paid off. Clear the board at will.
Kunstler: The Game in Review
… America’s hair is on fire. A chimeric lab virus apparently funded by our own government has been on-the-loose since January 2020. Supposedly, that is. It’s a little hard to tell because, especially in the early going, a lot of very old and unwell people died — as the very old and unwell do — and a Covid-19 tag was slapped on their death certificates, and that primed the hysteria pump that is still pumping away heroically. A Covid-19 virus may indeed be running through the population, but 98.8 percent do not die from it and, as Covid-19 came on, the usual seasonal flu apparently went on sabbatical. Go figure.
The ignited hysteria was reinforced by a PCR test routine that could produce Covid-19 “cases” on-demand, and still does — even though the government had to admit that the test was unreliable and ordered it discontinued (effective, wait for it, December 2021… really?). Meanwhile, the cases keep coming… as ascertained by what means exactly? PCR tests, still? Or what?
About twenty minutes after the virus came on the scene, a vaccine magically materialized in the pharma labs. And after a completely half-assed testing routine, it was commissioned with an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), which permitted a wholesale vax-up of the whole population, and provided legal immunity from lawsuits for the pharma companies involved. The public greeted it with a grateful awe usually reserved for religious visitations. Treatment protocols with existing drugs were bad-mouthed and then officially suppressed. They had to be — and still have to be — to maintain that EUA, because the vaxes are not approved by the FDA (despite a recent FDA psy-op to fake-out the public otherwise).
Meanwhile, adverse reactions to the vaxes are literally off-the-charts (the decades-long vaccine safety charts, that is) and those numbers have been likewise suppressed. There are also plenty of reasons to suppose the vaxes create stealth vascular damage to multiple organs that could lead to death over a few years’ time. The prudent have taken note. The prudent are now in for getting cancelled out of daily life for their prudence. Most of these people are onto the game that is being played on them. They must be punished. …
Brandon Smith: The Orwellian Vaccine Passport Agenda Relies On The Lie Of The "Social Contract"
Is it legally and morally acceptable to constrict the rights and economic access of people in order to force them to submit to an experimental “vaccine”, or any other medical procedure for that matter?
Furthermore, who gets to decide what medical procedures are acceptable to enforce? Who gets to be the all powerful and benevolent overseer of every human being’s health path. I ask this because I don’t think many people realize the future repercussions of allowing governments or corporations (the same thing these days) to dictate covid vaccinations. It doesn’t stop there; in fact, we have no idea where this stops once the Pandora’s box is opened.
C.J. Hopkins: The Covidian Cult (Part III)
I called the New Normals a “Covidian Cult,” not to gratuitously insult or mock them, but because that is what totalitarianism is … a cult writ large, on a societal scale. Anyone who has tried to get through to them can confirm the accuracy of that analogy. You can show them the facts until you’re blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. You think you are having a debate over facts, but you are not. You are threatening their new “reality.” You think you are struggling to get them to think rationally. You are not. What you are is a heretic
CWT #1: It Ends When You End It
The exodus from clown world begins with you
GeoPolitical Fare:
Welsh: Living In Reality: Afghanistan Issue
Both of these things: improved security AND no corruption should not be a surprise. If you are surprised, your mental model of the world was badly flawed. The US backed government was massively corrupt and the Taliban are competent true believers.
Orwellian Fare:
Eva Bartlett: The media's addiction to Covid-19 ‘fear porn’ is perpetuating an ever-worsening cycle of societal damage across the world
Over the past year and a half, hysterical media reporting on matters Covid-19 has reduced some people to a fearful state of unquestioning compliance – including a great number of otherwise critically-thinking journalists.
… Having myself been deeply focused on exposing war propaganda and other media lies around Syria, Palestine, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the years, my default position has become one of deep cynicism on mass media reporting. … generally you find copy-paste propaganda emanating largely from the bowels of the USA and the UK.
… By now hundreds of vocal doctors, nurses, virologists, immunologists, and other professionals actually worth listening to, whose data and experience counter the hype pumped out in media have very quickly disappeared from social media, or otherwise deemed quacks, and are thus largely silenced. This leaves the general public mainly getting their information via hyped-up media.
TYRANNY DOWN UNDER… OZ DEBUTS ORWELLIAN FACIAL RECOGNITION APP TO ENFORCE COVID QUARANTINE
CaitOz Fare:
n.a. (needed a break)
oh, wait, she’s back!:
Australia is not a country, it's a continent-sized US military base that happens to have kangaroos. A globe-spanning empire needs to keep the locals from interfering in the gears of the machine due to its geostrategically crucial proximity to Asia.
At a time when our species is hurtling toward its own demise we ought to be coming together and working in unison to avert disaster, and it says so much about the power of propaganda that we are instead doing the exact opposite.
Other Quotes of the Week:
By this time, the global pandemic had a face – or rather the fight against it had a face. It wasn’t the face of Dr. Fauci, the bureaucrat, but that of Bill Gates, the conscience of the planet. Why he holds this position is unclear to me, but I suppose his fortune is involved. Perhaps it’s because he has more to lose than most do if civilization is wiped out by a plague. Or maybe it’s his guilt over the likelihood that he will survive, in style, if we all die. Most likely, he simply bought his office, bestowing so much money on public health groups that they honored him with a title: Prince-Physician, Exalted Lord-Hygienist of the Realm.
Greenwald: Can someone let me know if there's another network where this discussion could be held? For those incapable of viewing the world without the simplistic and divisive binary presented to you: is this a left-wing or a right-wing message?
Tchir: As I sit here to type this weekend’s T-Report, one thought keeps jumping out at me – “SPIN!!!” It seems to be extremely difficult to understand anything right now as virtually every topic seems to be spun one way or the other. I’m not saying that there hasn’t always been spin (and always will be spin), but it just seems that it is incredibly difficult to tease out the “truth” or even the “facts” when putting a spin on things has become the standard way of communicating. … I’m increasingly convinced that spin has taken over some narratives and even those doing the spinning no longer realize that they are spinning things, because the spin has become their reality.
Welsh: So let’s bring this back to our typical libertarian with his whine that he earned his money and the government shouldn’t be allowed to take it away. He didn’t earn most of it. Most of it is because, in global terms, he was born on third and thinks he hit a triple. This doesn’t mean he hasn’t had to work for it, but it does mean that most of the value of his work has nothing to do with him
Pics of the Week:
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