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Sunday, January 23, 2022

2022-01-23

 *** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)

Regular Fare:

Hoisington Quarterly Review and Outlook

... This assessment is based on four considerations. First, the history of negative real yields for the past century and a half indicates that the downward risk to economic activity is significant, a sharp contradiction to the importance of economic gains in late 2021. Second, the theory of real interest rates and how they are determined confirm the historical analysis. Third, historical analysis indicates that negative real yields, combined with extreme over-indebtedness are an even greater negative for growth as is confirmed by scholarly research. Fourth, increasing obstacles to growth will encourage subsiding inflation

... The level of indebtedness of the economy is another of the critical moving parts in assessing future economic growth. Based on empirical evidence, theory and peer reviewed scholarly research, the massive secular increase in debt levels relative to economic activity has undermined economic growth, which has in turn, served to force real long-term Treasury yields lower. This pattern has been evident in both the United States and the more heavily indebted Japanese and European economies.



The economic mainstream is getting inflation wrong

... “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” as Milton Friedman famously argued: he meant that increases in the money supply, more than “real” output increases, would lead to more money chasing the same amount of goods and services, bidding up the prices charged by suppliers. But with QE in operation since 2009 in major developed economies, on a huge scale, inflation over more than a decade in those same developed eocnomies has variously been about as high as today, moderately above zero, and, for a while, actually negative. There is no obvious link between issuing more money and getting more inflation: the causality is not there. Friedman was wrong.

.... But labour markets overall, although disrupted in peculiar new ways by covid, are not showing much sign of general wage increases: with inflation rising, the opposite has kicked in, with real wages on average now falling behind price rises. Plausibly, this could change in the future, if pay demands pick up. But we are not there yet and, after a decade of flat or even falling real wages for most people, rising wages today should be the least of anyone’s economic concerns. It’s high time workers took a bigger slice of the pie.



Stephanie Kelton: How (Not) to Fight Inflation
Straight talk not bravado

... What actually happens when a central bank dials the interest rate up or down depends on a vast array of unknowables. It’s a point John Maynard Keynes made in one of my favorite passages from The General Theory:
“If, however, we are tempted to assert that money is the drink which stimulates the system to activity, we must remind ourselves that there may be several slips between the cup and the lip.”
You might be tempted to think that we’ve come a long way since Keynes issued that famous warning. That we’ve engineered a more reliable transmission mechanism so that monetary policy just works better now. That cutting interest rates will always stimulate the economy and raising them will always cool things off. That’s what most economists believe. And it’s what central banks tell us.

.... Heck, even the Fed Chairman reminded us in his recent confirmation hearing, that the Federal Reserve’s tools mostly work on the demand side, but the problems we’re facing today are still mainly related to challenges on the supply-side. If that’s correct—and I believe that it is—then it makes it that much harder to see how the impulse of Fed tightening is supposed to transmit itself throughout the system to cool the specific drivers of today’s elevated inflation.




 In the coming years, the US is on track to see the biggest fiscal contraction since WWII, Shvets says. Unfortunately, economic growth might also be an unwitting casualty of this shift from expansive to contractionary policies.

.... fiscal delta will remain very negative. And the same applies to monetary delta. Almost every central bank is now believing that they are behind the curve, which I disagree with. But nevertheless, that's what they feel and so monetary delta will be declining exactly the same time as a fiscal delta. And so without fiscal and monetary support, without really cyclical recovery, the way we had nearly 21 I think both reflation and inflation will start coming off. 



The history and politics of price controls and economic management in the United States

..... “Nothing sacred”
The eventual postwar acceptance of the Keynesian prescription for government spending has tended to eclipse the more adventurous Depression-era policy interventions. Our understanding of such interventions has enormous implications for the balance between public power and private autonomy, as well as the relationship between democracy, capitalism, and representative government.

.... Enthroning the Fed
Notwithstanding the ideological protest of the Cold War, we never escaped the necessity of economic planning. Despite all odds, the American public today still holds the government responsible for the future. To the person in the street, the agency for such planning is undoubtedly the Federal Reserve, which has won for itself not only the power to veto macroeconomic expansions but the emergency powers to rescue financial markets through targeted asset purchases to prevent securities’ price declines. There is a deep historical reason for popular focus on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve in the current debate over how to respond to inflation: during the last period of sustained inflation, it was central bank policy that took the final decisive initiative in 1979 in the political struggle over public control of prices. This is the implicit context of the recent intellectual controversy over how to control inflation: the fact that new tools would weaken the central bank’s monopoly over economic planning.

.... Such a price spike of a general commodity basic to capital equipment and buildings is certain to influence the structure of costs throughout the economy. It is clear in both the economic aggregates and industry-specific surveys that producers across industries are taking the opportunity of the Trump and Biden emergency relief stimulus, and the prospect of sustained development spending on both physical infrastructure and social policy, to raise profit margins. “It hardly seems as though businesses are being forced by costs to push up prices,” writes Dean Baker. “It instead looks like they are taking advantage of presumably temporary shortages to increase their profit margins.”




Other Charts: (source links: one, two, three, four, five)







Bubble Fare:

***** Jeremy Grantham (GMO): Let the Wild Rumpus Begin



This coming week is setting up deja vu of September 2008. A Fed dicking around worrying about inflation while markets are imploding all around them in real-time. Either the market final implodes ahead of the FOMC causing them to pivot, or the Fed will final implode markets AFTER the FOMC. Either way, all signs point to collapse. 

Breadth has been imploding for a full year now. While Nasdaq lows to end the week, were the worst since 2008. 

.... Next there's the now one year running Millennial margin call which is the locus of widely ignored collapse. It was one year ago that the Gamestop pump and dump scheme lured a generation into gamified markets where they could get bilked by known con men. What jackass pundits far and wide called the "democratization of markets" has now been revealed as the democratization of fraud. 

One growth sector after another is now imploding back to the pre-pandemic level on their way to the pandemic lows. The Global Nasdaq ended the week right at the pre-pandemic collapse level.

Also under the radar is this era's record global housing bubble. Which is already imploding in China. Recently we learned that U.S. housing construction is at the highest level in 50 years. And yet, home buyer sentiment remains mired at 40 year lows. This set-up is even WORSE than in 2007 which was the last time the Fed imploded a housing bubble they helped create. They don't get full credit however, because it's the housing industry that is once again telling us that high home prices are a "supply" problem. 

Fool me all the time, shame on me. 



COVID-19 notes:

Nervous system consequences of COVID-19

Although severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is considered a respiratory pathogen, myriad neurologic complications—including confusion, stroke, and neuromuscular disorders—manifest during acute COVID-19. Furthermore, maladies such as impaired concentration, headache, sensory disturbances, depression, and even psychosis may persist for months after infection, as part of a constellation of symptoms now called Long Covid. Even young people with mild initial disease can develop acute COVID-19 and Long Covid neuropsychiatric syndromes. The pathophysiological mechanisms are not well understood, although evidence primarily implicates immune dysfunction, including nonspecific neuroinflammation and antineural autoimmune dysregulation. It is uncertain whether unforeseen neurological consequences may develop years after initial infection. With millions of individuals affected, nervous system complications pose public health challenges for rehabilitation and recovery and for disruptions in the workforce due to loss of functional capacity. There is an urgent need to understand the pathophysiology of these disorders and develop disease-modifying therapies.



(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The world’s climate-stressed and pollution-degraded farming and agricultural system must shift quickly to sustainable practices to feed an additional 2 billion mouths expected by 2050, a new United Nations report finds.



RIP:

The beloved teacher and civil rights activist was a pioneer of engaged Buddhism who popularized mindfulness around the world.





We humans tend to think over-much of our logical reasoning, when I would argue that one of our most important cognitive capacities is pattern recognition. 

... “[E]motion shapes virtually every thought we have,” Mlodinow writes. “It contributes, moment to moment, to all our judgments and decisions…”


What’s Plato got to do with the environmental crisis?

Everything, according to Carl Safina, ecologist, author, fellow, and winner of the MacArthur genius grant. Carl joins me this week to discuss his new book which examines culture’s across the world, and their relationship to the planet. He argues that Plato’s concept of profanity engendered the Judeo-Christian monotheistic religions which view the world, and man, as sinful, in turn creating a Western culture which has no respect nor care for the natural world.


Related Tweets and Quotes: 

Cranfield: The CO₂ now in the air eventually produces a 4°C planet. The Earth's own paleoclimate records tell us this unequivocally. No computer models are needed, because we have this KNOWLEDGE. The other greenhouse gases add significant further warming.



Endemic Fare:

I am increasingly coming across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppiusel gato maloMathew CrawfordSteve KirschJessica Rose!
Paul AlexanderBerensonChudovLyons-WeilerToby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas OehlerJoel Smalley, aka Metatron and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; new addition: Marc Girardot; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and 
John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and [local hero] Byram Bridle, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts


COVID Analysis:


What is clearly evident both from the hospitalizations and deaths is that the double-vaccinated are now worse off per capita even against critical illness, and that pattern appears to be accelerating.


NHS backlogs and pressure from the pandemic has seen British mortuaries filled with over 10,000 extra bodies over the last 18 weeks, all of which are non-Covid related.



In recent months, a trend has been noted in the England and Wales all-cause mortality data, which has rung some alarm bells. Young males aged 15-19 have shown a rising death rate compared to the five-year average 2015-2019. At the same time, a large insurance company in the U.S. has reported a significant increase in deaths in the under 40s. This is obviously of concern, whatever the cause, but one possible factor which needs to be urgently excluded is any link to vaccine injury. The association between myocarditis and the mRNA vaccines, especially in younger age groups and in males, is already well established. It is particularly urgent as second doses and boosters are being rolled out, possibly putting adolescents at even higher risk, and at a time when the Omicron variant is much milder.

Members of HART, the Health Advisory and Recovery Team, have joined with other senior academics and health professionals to call for an immediate investigation into the increasing death rate amongst 15-19-year-old males since May of this year.

At the High Court on Thursday 13th January, the ONS (Office for National Statistics) confirmed that there has been a significant rise in the death rate for adolescent males over the last eight months, compared to the same time period of 2015-2019.  ... The concern is that this time period coincides with the rollout of vaccinations to this age group, who are known to be at an increased risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation), especially after the second dose. Far from rushing to investigate these deaths as they have arisen, ONS has stated it intends to undertake that work “when more reliable data are available”.



Big pharma is the least trusted industry. At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars. One pleaded guilty to fraud. Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue

... Twelve years ago we called for the immediate release of raw data from clinical trials. We reiterate that call now. Data must be available when trial results are announced, published, or used to justify regulatory decisions. There is no place for wholesale exemptions from good practice during a pandemic. The public has paid for covid-19 vaccines through vast public funding of research, and it is the public that takes on the balance of benefits and harms that accompany vaccination. The public, therefore, has a right and entitlement to those data, as well as to the interrogation of those data by experts.



Privately, I get the feeling there are more scientists who understand larger swaths of the story than will speak publicly. In fact, I'm almost daily hearing about those trying to shed greater light on important elements of the story, often trying to do so without attaching their own names. These are difficult times for honest scientists.

For anyone who wants to read or review Part 1:

A quick summary of primary open hypotheses explored:
  • Hypothesis 1: Omicron has been circulating widely for at least several months.
  • Hypothesis 2: Omicron was genetically engineered—most likely by somebody in the same working group who engineered an mRNA vaccine to stop SARS-CoV-2.
Now, before we really get started again, some places (including those I mentioned in Part 1) where there is now a pandemic of the vaccinated.
What Do The Genetic Sequences Tell Us?

The key aspect of omicron's genetic code to hone in on involves the nearly 4,000 nucleotides that makes up the coding for the spike protein. There, we see dozens of mutations that made a lot of people suspicious of the "variant" from the start. 

What is it those dirty, tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists see? ...

.... Scientists who have kept their sense of honesty intact in order to read words before the Ministry of Truth puts every last one of them (the words…or the scientists) in a blender have noted the weirdness surrounding the supposed closest SARS-CoV-2 relative, which is RaTG13.

... Those who oversubscribe to Hanlon's razor might think authorities to be dim-witted. While that might not be wrong most of the time, assuming that such dim-wittedness implies that they are not also nefarious seems…bat CoV insane.


Pandemic Commentary:


Look at how stupid being certain has made some people.

The certainty that a plastic screen makes some kind of difference in the endless fight against this apocalyptic virus, this Ragnarokarona, has resulted in this delightfully bonkers behaviour.

... There’s a pattern to this ‘pandemic’ too. An underlying order. Joel Smalley, in my view, has done a very significant piece of work here.

... It’s the mathematical representation of the statement the virus gonna virus.

There’s much I don’t yet understand about Joel’s work - which is not to say there’s anything wrong - it’s just an expression of my own ignorance. But it’s exciting as hell.

This is what happens when talented people, like Joel, ask questions and try to answer them. It’s what happens when there is uncertainty. It’s what happens when people don’t mindlessly follow some prescribed set of assumptions. It’s what happens when people don’t follow the SCIENCE™




It continues to amaze me how few people understand what is actually going on. Especially Canadians, who often seem blithely unaware of what is happening in Europe and ready to give up their own country without fight. As Neil Oliver says, in his usual articulate fashion, even our most basic instincts seem to have deserted us. Perfectly obvious patterns go unnoticed. Overt bullying fails to disgust us, or to move us to action. We digest government hate propaganda, teach it to our children, and parrot it to pollsters. We are as out of touch with the actual facts, in matters of which we nonetheless speak confidently, as we possibly could be. And we have no idea who our real friends are, or our real enemies. We have no idea who is leading us or where we are being taken.

In The Sanity Tax I raised again the question, why every arm?  Why those constantly shifting goalposts? First we were we told that when 70% of the population was vaxxed, it would all be over; then it was 80%, then 90%, and now 100%. Leave aside the medical folly of mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic. Leave aside the fact that no one is promising any more that even at 100% we will hear the final whistle. Leave aside the contradictions, confusion, and downright stupidity. The problem is not that the authorities don't know what they're doing. It's that they do know what they're doing. Or, at least, the ones that matter know what they're doing.




Of the corruption engulfing the pharmaceutical industry, he told Rogan:
“It’s destroying my profession. It’s destroying the practice of medicine worldwide. It’s destroying public health.… I’m personally offended by watching my discipline get destroyed.”
Toward the end of the Rogan podcast, Dr. Malone noted:
“There’s two hills that I’m willing to die on: one is stopping the jabs in the children, and one is resisting the erosion of free speech, which is the fundamental principle on which our democracy, our society, civilized Western culture is built on.”
In his article on Behavioral Control, Dr. Malone writes:
“For me, this is a battle that has completely changed my life, my way of thinking and my perspective on my government and world leaders. There is no going back for me.

 


As of now (Inauguration Day 2022), 3 critical Rona dissident/quasi-journo lights (that I follow and you should have too) have put much of their content behind a subscription paywall. I am talking about good frog Eugyppius, El Gato Malo, and Alex Berenstain (Berensford? Berensteyn? Beringstrait? I always forget.) These fellows have been pretty erudite while expressing non-wildeyed views of what global governments and global Big Pharma and global media hysterics have in store for us. The core benefit to their insights have been great accessibility in the clarity of their writing and also the great accessibility in free longform space here on Blogstack. This has allowed the unobstructed flow of information that would have otherwise been fully suppressed or twisted by TPTB and their shills, and we thank our authors for their service. Indeed, thank you Substack for standing well back, so far. Never get captured.

... Money will change this place. Just because I would never pay for words and would never charge for mine doesn’t mean I don’t value the work behind words. I just view mine as a sunk cost and wonder why like-minded friends cannot see theirs the same way. 



COVID Charts: (sources: one, two, ...)




COVID Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Capuzzo: Ding-dong, the fear narrative is dying. The wicked bitch of the West, propaganda, is dying. Omicron is producing millions of coughs but few coffins. England and Czechoslovakia, the Supreme Court of the United States, and even the real powers of the world like Starbucks are chucking masks and mandates.

el gato malo: it is time to return the governance of government to we the people and restore the notion that its just powers are derived from the consent of those governed, not their submission. 

RudkowskiThey are lying scumbags and will do everything in their power to fool you so you give up your human rights!!! 
They are the virus!

Kunstler: Let’s be honest: it’s getting laughable to seriously advocate vaxxing up a whole goshdarn population when it’s perfectly obvious now that the vaxxes don’t work and are making a lot of people sick with everything that can go wrong in a human body, plus Covid-19.

Malone: Frankly, thinking back on Obama’s vacation with Richard Branson on his private island on the Virgin Islands immediately after the former POTUS left the White House, I am again left with the odd sense of falling down a hole and not knowing how deep it goes.

PirzadaWhat I imagine a chief public health officer would write, but can't:
“Dear citizens, I write to explain some difficult realities. We are tired of fighting Covid-19. Our strategy was entirely based on vaccines, and though they are amazing, their benefits are proving fleeting...
"We could have built a strategy to supplement our vaccines with multiple mitigations, but we did not spend the time or the effort to do so despite having two years to plan and implement this...
"We ignored compelling evidence that the virus was airborne and highly dangerous in poorly ventilated indoor spaces. Instead, to avoid offending powerful personalities within our ranks, we stonewalled and now are completely unprepared to contain this virus...

LOOK: The Makati Covid Home Care Kit - thermometer, masks, alcohol, cooling fever pack, Betadine throat spray & gargle, Kamillosan throat spray, Paracetamol, Vitamin C, Zinc & an oxymeter!




CO-VIDs of the Week:





normalizing heart disease among children. thats the key, they know children will die from these vaccines so putting it in your face and telling you do not fuss, we can treat it...'they got this'...


Hart: Wow. @bariweiss is spot on... it is indeed a "pandemic of bureaucracy"


Dr. Roger Hodkinson does not mince words "When that penny starts to drop, the general public are going to be revolted!" Watch.


Legal philosopher @EvaVlaar: “A massive movement going on in Europe…people are aware of the fact that our constitutional rights are being set aside without an end-date…beginning phases of a Social Credit System. We are literally turning into China.”




Pushback Fare:

Worldwide Freedom Protests.





Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

"America is complicit in this," said one critic of "this horrific war that Biden and his senior officials once promised to end."


When the U.S. overthrows a foreign government it either works from the top down, the bottom up, or through military invasion, writes Joe Lauria.



The American Secretary of State is adding air miles to his account this week by visiting Kiev, Berlin and tomorrow Geneva for meetings with President Zelensky, Chancellor Scholz and RF Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov respectively.  However, whether abroad or at home he is a captive of the U.S. foreign affairs community echo chamber, utterly indifferent to external stimuli and incapable of responding appropriately to the changing environment. Everywhere he repeats the mantra that Russia is about to stage a classical invasion of Ukraine, just as everywhere President Biden repeats daily that the Russians will face consequences for their actions, very grave damage to their economy as a result of American led sanctions.

Meanwhile reality develops on its own, paying no heed to the script written in stone in Washington, D.C. 

The Russians have a very flexible and constantly changing set of responses to threats and opportunities. This is what makes it so difficult for us commentators to foresee the actual path to denouement.  But it is also what makes it almost certain the Russians will get what they want and change the European security architecture to their advantage in the face of American obtuseness. ....



..... Upton Sinclair was right. The two permissible party cults in the United States are the two right wings of one bird of prey. Biden knows it's all a game and Mitch knows it's all a game, and the people who get sucked into taking one of their sides by media pundits are simply being used as pawns.

Judging from millions of people up and quitting their jobs or going on strike, and students walking out of classrooms in protest of sloppy Covid protocols, and tenants taking to the streets against greedy corporate landlords, the days that the likes of Biden and McConnell could count on the Dupes of the Duopoly may turn out to be just figments of whatever it is that passes for their imaginations.



All of the above spells out deeper interconnection. The Putin-Raisi meeting precedes by two weeks the Putin-Xi meeting at the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing – when they are expected to take the Russia-China strategic partnership to the next level.

A new Eurasia-led order encompassing the vast majority of the world’s population is a work in fast progress. China using Eurasia as the larger stage to upgrade its global role, in parallel to the fast-evolving Sino-Russian-Iranian interaction, carries larger than life implications for the Western gatekeepers of the imperial ‘rules-based order.’

The de-Westernization of globalization, from a Chinese point of view, does involve a completely new terminology (‘community of shared destiny’). And there are hardly more glaring examples of ‘shared destiny’ than its deeper interconnection with both Russia and Iran.

One of the crucial geopolitical questions of our time is how an emergent, supposedly Chinese hegemony will articulate itself. If actions speak louder than words, then Sino-hegemony looks loose, malleable and inclusive, starkly different to the US variety. For one, it concerns the absolute majority of the Global South, which will be involved and vocal.

Iran is one of the leaders of the Global South. Russia, deeply implicated in de-Westernizing global governance, holds a unique position – diplomatically, militarily, as an energy provider – as the special conduit between East and West: the irreplaceable Eurasian bridge, and the guarantor of Global South stability.

All of that is at play now. It is no wonder that the leaders of the three main Eurasian powers are meeting and holding discussions in person, within just a matter of days.

As the Atlanticist axis drowns in hubris, arrogance, and incompetence, welcome to the lineaments of the Eurasian, post-Western world.



CaitOz Fare:

Lunatic Pundit Says It’s “All But Certain” We’re On The Cusp Of A Massive War With Russia

... Nothing either of these clowns say should be taken as true; any random schmuck off the street would be better-qualified to offer opinions on Russia than dopey mainstream liberal pundits who’ve spent the last five years being consistently wrong about that nation. But we should take very seriously the fact that they are working to insert these narratives into public consciousness.

..... These people are playing games with the lives of everyone on our planet, and they don’t even seem to understand that that’s what they’re doing.



...... When this report came out I was a bit surprised by the way unproven claims by anonymous government sources are treated as actual news stories for grown adults to read instead of empty nothing stuff to be ignored and flushed down our mental toilet tubes, as I’m sure you were too. But I did a little digging and it turns out that this sort of thing is actually quite commonplace within western news media institutions, like when we were told without evidence that the Russians were plotting a false flag operation in Ukraine, or like when we were told without evidence that the Russians are using high-tech ray guns to scramble the brains of US diplomats and spies and it turned out to be baseless, or like when we were told without evidence that the Russians were paying Afghan resistance fighters to kill western occupying troops and it turned out to be false and wrong, or like when we were told without evidence that Russians interfered in the United States election and it monopolized all news reports and political discourse for years, or like when we were told without evidence for years and years that Russia was about to invade Ukraine any minute now and then it kept not happening.

I’m sure this time is different, though. After all that practice and all that trial and error, I’m sure our trusted news media institutions have perfected their craft and are now masters at reporting the truth.



.... Consider the possibility that governments forcefully seizing control of all media and transforming them into official state propaganda outlets would actually be far less efficient at mass brainwashing than our current system in which people believe they are getting accurate information from a free and honest press.

..... Consider the possibility that real freedom isn’t being able to consume whatever advertisers have convinced you to consume, it’s being able to think with a mind that has not been molded by the powerful, to educate yourself in an information ecosystem that is not locked down by those who rule over you, and to speak the truth without having your speech stifled by oppressive dominators.

Consider the possibility that the only thing keeping us from creating heaven on earth is our inability to clearly see what’s going on in our world and thus strategize a truth-based path out of this mess, and that the powerful know this, and that that’s why they work so hard to keep us from seeing clearly. ...


Other Quotes of the Week:


You ever just take a step back and think to yourself “holy crap… this. THIS is what it’s all about? A man who dresses like this, whose tastes are absolute manifest shit, this is the guy who convinced three generations of women to get eating disorders?”




Pics of the Week:









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